Challenges and Perspectives in Big Eye-Movement Data Visual Analytics

Eye tracking has become an important technology to understand where and when people pay visual attention to a scene. Nowadays, eye tracking technology is moving from the laboratory to the real-world, producing more data at higher rates with extensive amounts of different data types. If this trend continues, eye tracking moves into the direction of big data. This requires developing new evaluation approaches beyond statistical analysis and visual inspection to find patterns in the data. As in big data analysis, visual analytics is one possible direction for eye movement data analysis. We look at current visual analytics methods and discuss how they can be applied to big eye-movement data. In this position paper we describe challenges for big eye-movement data visual analytics and discuss which techniques may be useful to address these challenges. Finally, we describe a number of potential scenarios for big eye-movement data.