Visualization of Distracted Mind

This project aims to visualize the human mind that is susceptible to distraction through the use of eye-tracking technology.

The GIF above illustrates the subject’s repeated attempts to follow the Walking to the Sky sculpture through gaze on CMU campus. The lines represent the trajectory of eye gaze in each attempt. The eye gaze was tracked by a Unity application on Meta Quest Pro. Despite the straight shape of the sculpture, the visualizations show the difficulty of following a straight line in presence of distracting objects in the surroundings.

People often say that the eyes are the window to the soul. When I saw the new release of the eye-tracking feature in one of the newest AR headsets Meta Quest Pro (shown in the picture below), I became interested in using this for the investigation of humans minds, using eye gaze as a proxy to the human mind. For this investigation, I developed a Unity application that tracks the right eye of the user and draws the trajectory of the eye gaze. The app also features record & replay, which generated the output above. The video shows exactly what the wearer sees in the headset. The project and workflow was largely inspired by A Sequence of Lines Traced by Five Hundred Individuals.

Evaluating the current state of the work, it would be better to showcase the idea through a better setup for the recording. My original plan was to build a 3D eye gaze heatmap like this work by Shopify. But only after spending a lot of time experimenting the eye-tracking and passthrough features, I realized this requires a separate 3D model of the space. In the future, I’d like to investigate more into 3D eye gaze tracking and also different implementations of experiments, for example, collaborative gaze work and more scientific investigation into how shared AR artifacts in a space impact people’s perception and experience in the space.