Fix your eyes on this

By tracking where people move their eyes when looking at Web sites, researchers offer new information about how to use your Web page real estate.

Quoted from: www.poynterextra.org...

How much do we really know about how people read news websites? We can track their behavior clicking through a site visit. We can collect personal information. We can ask them questions. But that presents a small part of the full picture. To get the rest, we need to climb inside their heads and look through their eyes as they view online news sites -- to peer into their minds and see patterns that even they don't consciously see.

As a webdeveloper I have found this data interesting to say the least - a great help when deisgning layout and advertising areas. On the other hand this seemed a bit scary to me...

It wasn't a typical monitor, though. Current-generation eyetrackers put a small video camera below the screen, which is calibrated and locked on to the test subject's gaze. As long as the person's head doesn't move outside of the camera's field of view (a region of space about a cubic foot -- more than enough leeway for typical usage), the eyetracker stays on target throughout the session.

and this, even more so...

The technology has gotten so good that today there exists eyetracking equipment that can use a telephoto lens and track a stationary person's gaze from 20 feet away. (We didn't use such equipment for Eyetrack III.)

Should be quite easy for big bro to slip this kinda stuff into monitors, tvs, etc... great for the NWO, they could have all sorts of signs/images stationed around the city and track how long your gaze stayed on each image to see what interested you, and what didn't... great for advertisers too.

Not so great if my wife got a hold of this tech.. no more perving for me LOL

What do you think about this? Do any of you have more information on hidden embedded cameras in appliances and stuff?

REgards

They don't need to slip this stuff into appliances, how would they use it anyway?

Once the research is done, all it is going to do is make advertisements more effective and help researches understand more about the human eye and memorization.

Originally posted by webvida
By tracking where people move their eyes when looking at Web sites, researchers offer new information about how to use your Web page real estate.
[...]

What do you think about this? Do any of you have more information on hidden embedded cameras in appliances and stuff?

I did read something kinda similar, but this was about using the position of the users mouse in the same way - basically to analyse (I love that word, but only because of the schoolboy humour it affords in sensible publications, anyway...) to analyse how the user viewed the page.

I'll see if I can reference it as it's a rubbish reply otherwise.
(I'm tempted to say it may have been on wired.com, but that's only a guess).

Originally posted by MrJingles
They don't need to slip this stuff into appliances, how would they use it anyway?

Yes I guess you are right - but on the other hand they could be easily slip other tracking type gadgets into appliances including cameras and audio recording stuff - would not be hard to do - especially in computers - how many of you actually take you computer monitors apart to see what is inside?

It would be easy for them then and they could send the info to a database via the internet - it would be a good way for "them" to add an image to the information they all ready have on you

REgards

Originally posted by 0951

Originally posted by webvida
By tracking where people move their eyes when looking at Web sites, researchers offer new information about how to use your Web page real estate.
[...]

What do you think about this? Do any of you have more information on hidden embedded cameras in appliances and stuff?

I did read something kinda similar, but this was about using the position of the users mouse in the same way - basically to analyse (I love that word, but only because of the schoolboy humour it affords in sensible publications, anyway...) to analyse how the user viewed the page.

I'll see if I can reference it as it's a rubbish reply otherwise.
(I'm tempted to say it may have been on wired.com, but that's only a guess).

Yes sounds interesting - it would be easier to track a mouse position than eye position, but I guess it's not as acurate as you don't necessarily have the pointer positioned on what you are looking at or what you are concentrating on...

Regards

I don't know. If the user doesn't have a stable fast connection, the feed from the camera is going to be laggy. Even if you do have a fast connection you know will notice their is lag or the picture becomes choppy this would def ruin the experiment. Even with that, the camera would have to have a connection set up to this person's website so if you had something like SP2 installed, theres no way this could be possible. Come to think of it, i'm not sure if they can even make cameras that can track eye focus in real time. The eye moves to fast, and once the size of your pupil changes your focus would change, the camera would have to adjust to this...i'm not buying this...Another thing i thought of...the size of your monitor...the curvature of your monitor..im def not buying this.

[edit on 7-10-2004 by Aether]

Originally posted by Aether
I don't know. If the user doesn't have a stable fast connection, the feed from the camera is going to be laggy. Even if you do have a fast connection you know will notice their is lag or the picture becomes choppy this would def ruin the experiment. Even with that, the camera would have to have a connection set up to this person's website so if you had something like SP2 installed, theres no way this could be possible. Come to think of it, i'm not sure if they can even make cameras that can track eye focus in real time. The eye moves to fast, and once the size of your pupil changes your focus would change, the camera would have to adjust to this...i'm not buying this...Another thing i thought of...the size of your monitor...the curvature of your monitor..im def not buying this.

[edit on 7-10-2004 by Aether]

Yes I agree that it is pretty far fetched, but on the subject of lagg and internet speed; awhile back I had the misfortune to be stuck with 56k modem for a year or so, really sucked I can tell you... normally I had download speeds of around 5kb/sec on a good day. But you know what? I was downloading some software and all of a sudden my download speed lept to 300kb per sec - I know sounds BS, but I swear it is true, the file was around 1.5 mb and it only took a few seconds to download - I don't even get nearly this rate with adsl ... now this makes me wonder if the speeds we experience on the net actually have anything to do with the modem or connection types... so maybe this can be increased for the big bros to get the data they need quickly...

regards

Originally posted by webvida
But you know what? I was downloading some software and all of a sudden my download speed lept to 300kb per sec - I know sounds BS, but I swear it is true, the file was around 1.5 mb and it only took a few seconds to download - I don't even get nearly this rate with adsl ...

Lot of only zeroes or ones so compressios works well, also browser caches page contents so if you downloaded it before so after that browser really won't download it, just opens file from HD.

You're right, they could easily slip cameras and other things into such devices. But you're talking about hundreds of hours of video for millions of people, even if you had high speed internet the servers would surely lag. Besides that, who the hell is going to sit down and analyze all this? They would need to hire thousands of people to analyze this for who knows what for. Surely if this was done, something would have leaked by now.