Case Studies

Using the Eye Tracker

This short video illustrates how eye tracking works. It’s about 6 minutes long. It was edited by Breen Sweeney (Associate Teaching Fellow in COLMSCT) using longer video prepared by Dave Perry. Here is Breen’s project page and his new VLE blog can be found here.

The terms ‘immersion’ and ‘immersiveness’ are used to describe the degree of involvement in a virtual world, and the terms are usually applied to games, but apply equally well to social virtual worlds like Second Life. Although their meaning is intuitively understood by participants in those worlds there is no agreed definition of the terms. Breen suggested a hypothesis that the more immersed a user is, the more they will concentrate on their own avatar, rather than look at other areas of the screen.
Eye tracking hardware can determine where a user is gazing at any time and hence record eye movements. During the Summer of 2008 Breen carried out an experiment to compare Second Life with the Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) called RuneScape, as a first step towards quantifying whether users became more immersed in a game or in a social virtual world.
Breen’s COLMSCT colleagues Catherine Reuben, Diane Ford, Frauke Constable, Laura Hills, Katherine Perry, and Claire Dunlop participated in this pilot study. "I received help, advice and supervision from Dave Perry in the Institute of Educational Technology". A Tobii T60 eye tracking monitor was used for the pilot, connected to a purpose-built computer running Windows.
The conclusions from the experiment have been written up and presented in a paper at the ReLIVE08 conference in November 2008. A preprint is available here [link to be added]. The paper is also available in the conference proceedings which are published under “Proceedings of Researching Learning in Virtual Environments International Conference, 20-21 November 2008, The Open University, UK. – Mathematics in a virtual world: How the immersive environment of Second Life can facilitate the learning of mathematics and other subjects”, pages 298-309” - ISBN 97818487310U4.