Eye tracking adds important information to observational studies. Eye movements reflect emotions and cognitive processes, which add extra value to your research. The Observer^® XT allows you to analyze the eye tracker’s video output and enables you to record the context in which the eye movements occurred.

• Analyze eye tracking videos.
• Relate mental processes to behavior.
• Synchronous display of behavior, gaze data, and video.
• Analyze the combination of behavior and gaze data.
• Discover that additional modalities are possible.

Windows to the soul
Eye movements contain important information about mental states. Eyes are the windows to the soul. Gaze direction reflects attention, pupil dilation reflects emotional state, and blink frequency is associated with mental load. Scan paths tell how people read websites and papers: which parts of an advertisement, picture or web page they actually notice, how long they look at various items, etc. Modern eye trackers can easily generate this information, which makes them increasingly popular in behavioral studies.

Human Factors research especially benefits from eye tracking, but it is also widely used in psychology, consumer behavior, and usability studies.

Meaningful data
Behavioral scientists are interested in the combination of eye movements and other behavior. For instance, a pilot’s number of eye blinks per minute becomes meaningful in relation to the tasks he performs. A combination of The Observer XT and an eye tracker allows you to make synchronous recordings of behavior and eye movements, then visualize and analyze them together. Moreover, you can run these experiments in realistic environments, and thus follow behavior and mental state as they develop.

The right eye tracker
Whatever your needs, we can deliver the right eye tracker. We offer several different types, but all contain a camera following eye movement, and software to acquire the data. Some are built into a bicycle helmet or on a cap, allowing free head movement, others are built into a computer monitor or put on a table. We can deliver and integrate both stationary and head mounted eye trackers into your lab.

To choose the right eye tracker for your research you can count on our advice. You can benefit from our many years of experience, and be sure that the eye tracker will work with The Observer XT and the rest of your research equipment. For more information about eye trackers contact our sales department.

Video analysis
Most eye trackers generate a video with gaze overlay. Such videos are suitable for analysis in The Observer XT, either stand alone, or in combination with a scene video, a close up, or a video from the Mobile Device Camera. You can also import the data from the eye tracker into The Observer XT. Visualize pupil dilation as a graph along with the video, or import blinks and area of interest views as events. The Observer XT is the ideal research tool to integrate different data streams, for example eye tracking video, eye tracking data, behavioral data, and a scene video.

Extensive analysis
To get the most of your research data use:

• The Observer XT to manually score additional data and integrate these with facial expression data (obtained with FaceReader™), or with recorded user activities on a computer (from uLog™). The Observer XT also enables you to visualize and analyze the data together. Compare eye movements during different parts of an experiment, or relate eye movements to facial expressions as a stimulus response.
• Theme™ to analyze eye tracking events and to detect the main lines in these complex events. Even though Theme will quickly detect common patterns in raw data, it will often detect surprisingly new patterns leading to significant new insights.

Full support
All our labs come with installation, training, and support. We set up your lab and make sure you know how to operate all hardware and software components. We train you how to use our sortware tools and give advice on different observation methods. If you experience any challenges, our support department is there to help you out. In short, we help you get the best out of your behavior research!