What Is Poor Man’s Eye Tracking Good For?

In this paper, we describe a new methodology for tracking a user’s areas of interest on a computer screen. In contrast to costand analysis-intense eye-tracking studies, our approach operates on a software-only basis that requires no additional hardware. In an exploratory study, we compared our software-based tracker with hardware eye trackers with respect to the types of recorded data. Interestingly, our software-based «poor man's» eye tracker allows the collection of data that would pose several problems for hardware eye tracker. In this paper, we describe a study in which we compared whether both approaches yield similar data. A first evaluation of our results clearly indicates high correlations between the software eye tracker and the hardware system.