SocialEyes: Scaling mobile eye-tracking to multi-person social settings
Abstract
Eye movements provide a window into human behaviour, attention, and interaction dynamics. Challenges in real-world, multi-person environments have, however, restrained eye-tracking research predominantly to single-person, in-lab settings. We developed a system to stream, record, and analyse synchronised data from multiple mobile eye-tracking devices during collective viewing experiences (e.g., concerts, films, lectures). We implemented lightweight operator interfaces for real-time-monitoring, remote-troubleshooting, and gaze-projection from individual egocentric perspectives to a common coordinate space for shared gaze analysis. We tested the system in a live concert and a film screening with 30 simultaneous viewers during each of two public events (N=60). We observe precise time-synchronisation between devices measured through recorded clock-offsets, and accurate gaze-projection in challenging dynamic scenes. Our novel analysis metrics and visualizations illustrate the potential of collective eye-tracking data for understanding collaborative behaviour and social interaction. This advancement promotes ecological validity in eye-tracking research and paves the way for innovative interactive tools.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2407.06345,
title = {SocialEyes: Scaling mobile eye-tracking to multi-person social settings},
author = {Shreshth Saxena and Areez Visram and Neil Lobo and Zahid Mirza and Mehak Rafi Khan and Biranugan Pirabaharan and Alexander Nguyen and Lauren K. Fink},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.06345},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Please refer to the supplementary video illustrating the proposed approach in this paper here: https://tinyurl.com/multipersonET