EyeTrackR: An R Package for Extracting and Visualizing Data from Mobile and Static Eye Trackers
Chunyang Li
Utah State University
Jürgen Symanzik
Utah State University
Eye tracking has been used in many scientific fields, such as behavioral sciences, education, marketing, and sports. Visualization usually plays an important role in the analysis of eye tracking data. So far, there existed no R package that contains a whole collection of eye tracking data processing and visualization tools. In this article, we introduce an R package, EyeTrackR, for processing and visualizing data from mobile and static eye trackers. The main functionalities in EyeTrackR are: (i) Automatic extraction of mobile eye tracking data; (ii) Definition of Areas of Interest (AOIs) and data summarization; (iii) Common eye tracking visualization tools; (iv) Linked microposter plots, linked timeline microposter plots, and linked scanpath microposter plots. Our primary application in this article is for people looking at scientific posters. The plots from (iv) are based on the idea of linked micromap plots, a plot type that displays geographical distributions by linking statistical summaries with smaller groups of geographical regions. They have been specifically developed and implemented to visualize how people are looking at different components of scientific posters.