Visual Analysis of Eye Movements by Hierarchical Filter Wheels

The visual exploration of spatio-temporal eye movement data is challenging, especially if we are interested in the movement patterns of a large number of study participants. For example, if popular visualization techniques like heat maps or gaze plots are used, we may lose the temporal information or get lost in visual clutter. To address these issues, we propose an approach for filtering saccadic eye movement data called hierarchical filter wheels, which employs a radial representation of saccade information. It supports the analysis of sequences of saccades by filtering them with respect to direction and length. The focus of our approach is a fast initial analysis of data from eye tracking studies without the need of defining areas of interest (AOIs) or other preprocessing of the data. The hierarchical filters are interactively generated on users´ demand by creating a hierarchy of multiple filter wheels each filtering one element of the sequence. We use a bubble tree layout to represent the generated filter hierarchy. The node positions in our layout directly represent the spatial properties of the filter criteria allowing an intuitive incremental generation and understanding of filter hierarchies. We illustrate the approach by applying it to eye movement data formerly recorded in an eye tracking study investigating the readability of different node-link tree diagrams. We further demonstrate how the hierarchical filter wheels can be used in combination with gaze plots.