We’ve been involved in the organization of two co-located events at this year’s ETRA conference: Eye Tracking for Spatial Research (ET4S) and Eye Tracking and Visualization (ETVIS). Even though ETRA and all co-located events had to be canceled, the review process was finished regularly, and accepted papers are now available in the ETRA Adjunct Proceedings in the ACM Digital Library.
Accepted ET4S papers are also linked from the ET4S website.
The second phase of the FRS programme at the Singapore-ETH Centre officially started on April 1st with an online research kick-off meeting. It was launched in the midst of a global crisis – COVID-19, highlighting the need to better understand and foster resilience. Within FRS-II there is a particular emphasis on social resilience to enhance the understanding of how socio-technical systems perform before, during and after disruptions.
GeoGazeLab researchers will contribute within a research cluster focusing on distributed cognition (led by Martin Raubal). More specifically, we will develop a visualization, interaction, and notification framework for communicating predicted disruptions to stakeholders. Empirical studies utilizing eye tracking and gaze-based interaction methods will be part of this project, which is led by Martin Raubal and Peter Kiefer.
The 5th edition of ET4S is taking place as a co-located event of ETRA 2020 in Stuttgart, Germany, between 2 and 5 June 2020.
The 1st Call for Papers is now available online.
We are again involved in the organization of ETRA 2020, the ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications, taking place in Stuttgart in June 2020.
As one of our activities at ETRA 2020, Peter is co-chairing the Demo&Video Track. The Call for Demos&Videos is now online and open for submissions.
As part of our involvement in the upcoming Future Resilient Systems II research programme, we are looking for a PhD candidate working on the development of a visualization, interaction and notification framework for communicating disruptions predicted from weak signals.
Employment will be at the Singapore-ETH Centre, workplace Singapore.
More details and application here.
We’re very happy to welcome Victor Schinazi as a new team member! He’ll be working with us for 4 months before joining the faculty of Psychology at Bond University in Australia.
David Rudi has successfully defended his doctoral thesis on 16 September (“Enhancing Spatial Awareness of Pilots in Commercial Aviation”). We cordially congratulate, and are happy that he’ll stay with us as a PostDoc starting from November!
On 11 September, Prof. Dr. Detlef Günther, the Vice President for Research and Corporate Relations of ETH Zurich, has visited the D-BAUG department and informed himself about the exciting research activities of the different institutes.
Our institute was represented by Peter Kiefer, who summarized the research of the GeoGazeLab. The slides provide an overview on our research interests and current projects.
Edit. The presentation includes the PEGGASUS project. This project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 821461
Our group has organized the “Eye Tracking for Spatial Research” event as a track at this year’s ETRA conference in Denver, Colorado. It featured four full paper presentations, one short paper presentation, as well as an invited talk (see program). A dominant topic at this year’s ET4S was augmented/mixed/virtual reality. As a particular highlight, our invited speaker Sophie Stellmach (Senior Scientist at Microsoft) highlighted the fascinating opportunities of HoloLens 2, an upcoming mixed reality device that will have eye tracking capabilities included.
The GeoGazeLab was further involved with Fabian’s talk on “POI-Track: Improving Map-Based Planning with Implicit POI Tracking” and Kuno presenting his work on “Space-Time Volume Visualization of Gaze and Stimulus” in the ETRA main program. A paper co-authored by Martin was presented by one of his co-authors (“Eye Tracking Support for Visual Analytics Systems: Foundations, Current Applications, and Research Challenges”).
The invited talk by Sophie Stellmach (Microsoft) …
… attracted quite some audience.
Testing HoloLens 2 after ET4S.
The program of ET4S 2019, a track at ETRA, is now available on the website: http://et4s.ethz.ch/program/.
We’re excited to announce Sophie Stellmach (Senior Scientist @ Microsoft, HoloLens team) as this year’s invited speaker at ET4S. The title of her talk is “Eye Tracking in Mixed Reality and its Promises for Spatial Research”.
ET4S 2019 is going to take place 26 June 2019, 15:30 – 18:00, at the ETRA conference in Denver, Colorado, USA. Attendance of ET4S is included in the ETRA registration.
Kuno Kurzhals has started in our group as a PostDoc.
Welcome to the team!
More than 30 participants attended the meeting of the Eye Tracking Interest Group Zurich (ETIZ) hosted by us on 26 March 2019. Our invited speaker Andreas Bulling (University of Stuttgart) provided insights into his current and past research on pervasive eye tracking. Tiffany Kwok (GeoGazeLab, LAMETTA project) presented her PhD research on gaze-guided narratives. In an interactive mini-workshop, moderated by Arzu Çöltekin (FHNW), attendees brainstormed about challenges of eye tracking in VR and AR displays. Discussions were continued during an apéro, and many took the opportunity to try out a gaze-adaptive map demo (Fabian Göbel, GeoGazeLab, IGAMaps project).
We are going to host the next meeting of the Eye Tracking Interest Group Zurich (ETIZ). Everyone using, or planning to use eye tracking in their research is cordially welcome!
Date, time: 26th March 2019, 17:30
Place: ETH Zurich Hönggerberg, HIL D 53
17:30 – 17:35
Welcome
17:35 – 18:15
“Recent Advances Towards Pervasive Eye Tracking”
Prof. Dr. Andreas Bulling, Professor for Human-Computer Interaction and Cognitive Systems
University of Stuttgart, Germany
18:15 – 18:35
“Gaze-Guided Narratives”
Tiffany C.K. Kwok, Doctoral Student
Geoinformation Engineering, ETH Zurich
18:35 – 18:55
“Eye tracking in VR and AR displays: A mini-workshop”
Dr. Arzu Çöltekin, Assoc. Prof., Principal Investigator
Institute for Interactive Technologies IIT, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW
18:55 – 19:00
Closing
19:00
Apéro, with demo of a gaze-adaptive interactive map by Fabian Göbel, Geoinformation Engineering
We are happy to welcome Luis Lutnyk as a new PhD student in the GeoGazeLab! His research will be about eye tracking in aviation.
Edit. Luis is part of the PEGGASUS project. This project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 821461
We have presented the LAMETTA project at the GeoSummit in Bern (6-7 June 2018), the largest congress for geoinformatics, surveying and planning in Switzerland.
Federal councilor Guy Parmelin was one of the first visitors of our exhibit and was very interested in the innovative system. Due to his subsequent opening speech, there was no time to try out the gaze-based tourist guide to Lake Lucerne himself, but the short visit seemed already impressive.
A large number of visitors from both, industry and academia, visited our exhibit and tried out the system. In addition, our exhibit was part of the GeoSchoolDay – an event in conjunction with GeoSummit which introduces students at high school age to applications and opportunities of geo information technologies. Approx. 500 pupils visited LAMETTA and learned about eye tracking and its application in interactive systems.
We congratulate Ioannis Giannopoulos to his new university professor position at TU Vienna, where he is heading the Research Group Geoinformation at the Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation (since January). Ioannis was a PhD student and PostDoc with the GeoGazeLab between 2012 and 2017.
Have you ever thought of eye tracking data as spatial “big” data? Are you collecting large amounts of eye tracking data together with geo-spatial coordinates, or are you applying machine learning on such data? Then the workshop on “Spatial Big Data and Machine Learning in GIScience” at this year’s GIScience conference in Melbourne might be interesting for you.
The 1st Call for Papers is now available on the website.
We’ll present our ideas on how to enrich a tourist’s experience with gaze-guided narratives at a CHI workshop in Montreal this year:
Kiefer, P., Adams, B., and Raubal, M. (2018) Gaze-Guided Narratives for Outdoor Tourism. HCI Outdoors: A CHI 2018 Workshop on Understanding Human-Computer Interaction in the Outdoors
This research is part of the LAMETTA project.
We welcome Tiffany as a new PhD student in the LAMETTA project!
Andrew T. Duchowski, Krzysztof Krejtz, Izabela Krejtz, Cezary Biele, Anna Niedzielska, Peter Kiefer, Ioannis Giannopoulos, and Martin Raubal (2018). The Index of Pupillary Activity: Measuring Cognitive Load vis-à-vis Task Difficulty with Pupil Oscillation In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018), ACM (accepted)
The program of the ET4S workshop on 14 January 2018 is now available on the workshop website: http://spatialeyetracking.org/et4s-2018/program
You have an interesting eye tracking research prototype to show? You would like to join the ET4S workshop, but have missed the deadline for regular papers? You have a regular paper accepted and would like to take the opportunity to gain even more visibility and get direct feedback for your system?
We’ll have a dedicated demo session at the ET4S workshop in January 2018 in Zurich. We hope you consider submitting a short abstract (1 page) with a demo proposal (before November, 8).
ET4S website: http://spatialeyetracking.org/et4s-2018/
We are glad to announce that the ET4S workshop 2018 will be opened with a keynote given by Roman Bednarik, an adjunct professor at the School of Computing, University of Eastern Finland:
Predicting user states from gaze and other multimodal data
Abstract: In this talk I will present research conducted by our team at UEF related to user state recognition during problem solving and other interactive contexts. We adapt and apply machine learning techniques to model behavioral and mental states, including action prediction and problem-solving state prediction.
Due to several requests, the submission deadline for the ET4S 2018 workshop has been extended to
11 October 2017
We’re excited to present the LAMETTA project at Scientifica, the science fair of ETH Zurich and University of Zurich. Come and try out an interactive mobile eye tracking system! Explore a mountain panorama and interact with it only by using your gaze (details in German)!
You can find us Friday, 1 September to Sunday, 3 September at University of Zurich main building (West Foyer).
Check out our Scientifica video!
We are looking for a PhD candidate (LAMETTA project).
More details and application on the ETH website.
Dr. Ioannis Giannopoulos received the ETH Zurich Culmann Award in 2017 for an outstanding doctoral thesis “Supporting Wayfinding Through Mobile Gaze-Based Interaction”.
Peter Kiefer and Ioannis Giannopoulos have contributed to an article titled “An inverse-linear logistic model of the main sequence” (Journal of Eye Movement Research, JEMR). It is now available online:
http://dx.doi.org/10.16910/jemr.10.3.4
Abstract. A model of the main sequence is proposed based on the logistic function. The model’s fit to the peak velocity-amplitude relation resembles an S curve, simulta- neously allowing control of the curve’s asymptotes at very small and very large amplitudes, as well as its slope over the mid amplitude range. The proposed inverse-linear logistic model is also able to express the linear relation of duration and amplitude. We demonstrate the utility and robustness of the model when fit to aggregate data at the small- and mid-amplitude ranges, namely when fitting microsaccades, saccades, and superposition of both. We are confident the model will suitably extend to the large-amplitude range of eye movements.
Our article “Gaze-Informed Location Based Services” has been accepted for publication by the International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS):
Anagnostopoulos, V.-A., Havlena, M., Kiefer, P., Giannopoulos, I., Schindler, K., and Raubal, M. (2017). Gaze-informed location based services. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 2017. (accepted), PDF
The article introduces the concept of location based services which take the user’s viewing direction into account. It reports on the implementation and evaluation of such gaze-informed location based service which has been developed as part of the LAMETTA project. This research has been performed in collaboration between the GeoGazeLab, Michal Havlena (Computer Vision Laboratory, ETH Zurich) and Konrad Schindler (Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, ETH Zurich).
Abstract
Location-Based Services (LBS) provide more useful, intelligent assistance to users by adapting to their geographic context. For some services that context goes beyond a location and includes further spatial parameters, such as the user’s orientation or field of view. Here, we introduce Gaze-Informed LBS (GAIN-LBS), a novel type of LBS that takes into account the user’s viewing direction. Such a system could, for instance, provide audio information about the specific building a tourist is looking at from a vantage point. To determine the viewing direction relative to the environment, we record the gaze direction
relative to the user’s head with a mobile eye tracker. Image data from the tracker’s forward-looking camera serve as input to determine the orientation of the head w.r.t. the surrounding scene, using computer vision methods that allow one to estimate the relative transformation between the camera and a known view of the scene in real-time and without the need for artificial markers or additional sensors. We focus on how to map the Point of Regard of a user to a reference system, for which the objects of interest are known in advance. In an experimental validation on three real city panoramas, we confirm that the approach can cope with head movements of varying speed, including fast rotations up to 63 deg/s. We further demonstrate the feasibility of GAIN-LBS for tourist assistance with a proof-of-concept experiment in which a tourist explores a city panorama, where the approach achieved a recall that reaches over 99%. Finally, a GAIN-LBS can provide objective and qualitative ways of examining the gaze of a user based on what the user is currently looking at.
A double Special Issue on “Eye Tracking for Spatial Research” in Spatial Cognition&Computation, guest-edited by Peter, Ioannis, Martin, and Andrew Duchowski, has appeared [URL].
Nineteen manuscripts were submitted to an open Call for Submissions, out of which seven were finally accepted after a rigorous review process.
The Special Issue commences with an overview article, authored by the Guest Editors: “Eye tracking for spatial research: Cognition, computation, challenges” [URL, PDF].
