GazeRecorder is a free eye tracking software that basically tracks your eye movements and your gaze on the computer screen. It basically calibrates your eye movements and face so it can learn where the eye moves on the screen. It employs complex tracking algorithms to track eyes and even works when your face is partially obstructed.
You do not need any specialized hardware for using this. All you need is a PC and a webcam. There will be no physical contact involved and the eye movement will be mapped in real-time.
This application also creates a heat map of your gaze on the screen. This is done by recording the aggregated gaze over your screen. Apart from recording a heatmap, this free eye tracking software also records the calibration info and the whole sample of eye movement in text files. You can also check out a less sophisticated camera mouse here.
This gaze tracking software is really helpful if one wants to learn of human eye movement habits on the screen. As a demo, it can only record for 60 seconds which is enough for a normal study. One use case I can think of is to see if your website layout is user friendly. Just open your website and let a user look over it. This software will track the gaze of the user, and you will instantly know which areas of your website are getting the most attention. Those places will obviously be most suited to put call to action buttons.
Let’s check out this free eye tracking software.
How to Record Eye Tracking
Before you can record anything, you need to calibrate the software for your face. The first time you run GazeRecorder, click ‘Start cam’ to start the cam. The application will automatically calibrate your face and eye movements. You’ll be required to look and follow a red dot on the screen to calibrate. After the calibration you can check if the calibration is accurate. If not, then you can re-calibrate by clicking ‘Reinit Face’ and ‘Calibrate Gaze’ for face and eyes respectively.
Record Eye Movement
Once you have this free eye tracking software calibrated, you can now begin to record your eye movements on the screen. Click on ‘Rec’ to record and the application will start recording. It will record everything till 60 seconds (demo version) or till you click ‘Stop Rec’.
You can edit the recording settings in the ‘Eye Tracker Settings’. Here you can change the FOV (field of view) of camera, camera position, resolution and the head model. You can also set the number of dots that should be shown when your eyes are calibrated.
Analyzing the Results
You can see the recorded results following the recording. Click on ‘Show Results’ and you’ll see the results of the gaze heatmap, calibration and eye movement data. Use this info any way you like.
The Heatmap will come as video and an image, It tells you what part of the screen you spent most of the time watching. It goes from red to green where the red area is more viewed and the green area is less viewed. You can change the time window of the heatmap and the plot size from the ‘Result Settings’ tab.
My Analysis
This free eye tracking software looks pretty good and delivers what it claims. Of course, it is not 100% accurate, but it is still pretty good at what it does. It can easily be used well when you are heat mapping to study eye movement.
Also, this application can probably be further developed to serve other purposes as well. For example, it could be developed as a screen cursor for handicapped people or maybe a way to authorize services that differentiates between a human and a bot. This software is definitely worth trying.
Get GazeRecorder here.
Do you know a better way to track eye movements? Do share in the comments!