Virtual and real-world AOI in AR

Abstract

Our work presents a visualization tool, which allows the exploration and comparison of area of interests (AOIs) in an augmented reality (AR) environment. For this purpose, we utilized Microsoft HoloLens 2, which comprises an integrated eye tracker. We extend existing visualization techniques for analysing eye tracking data by taking the AR aspect into account. This requires us to group the environment into real AOIs and virtual AOIs. Virtual AOIs can be identified automatically, however, for real AOIs a manual annotation is necessary. Therefore, our tool provides methods for annotating real-world AOIs efficiently and enables a subsequent analysis of the annotated data, which also facilitates the comparison between multiple participants. To provide a spatio-temporal context, we embedded a combination of two visualization techniques into our tool. The first visualization technique is a timeline visualization, which creates a temporal context. In this timeline, we represent the fixation data by frames depicting the area under observation. Each frame in this visualization gets annotated and then analysed using a scarfplot visualization. For the second visualization technique, we incorporated a gaze replay into our tool. The gaze replay provides the spatial context for the frames, which need to be annotated. We link the timeline visualization with the gaze replay to enable a simple detection and definition of real-world AOIs. To this end, we present a case study, in which we discuss the advantage and disadvantages of our tool. For this purpose, we load gaze data collected from several participants in a pilot study into our visualization tool and analyse it.