philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Eye Tracking Used To Determine Personality Traits In New Study

Over the past few years, eye tracking technology has emerged as a field of much academic and corporate interest. With major acquisitions by Apple (SMI) and Oculus (The Eye Tribe), it's clear that major international companies regard eye tracking technology as an vital facet of Industry 4.0 -- particularly in its integration with virtual and augmented reality technologies (VR/AR), which involve persistent interaction with the human eye.

An announcement Friday, July 27, from the University of South Australia (UniSA) -- in partnership with the University of Stuttgart, Flinders University, and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics -- points to some of the widespread implications of eye tracking in daily life.

In the study, researchers tracked 42 participants' eye movements while going about their day on a university campus, and matrixed these findings against user questionnaires.

The results assert that machine learning can in fact deduce important personality traits with appropriate datasets -- with the algorithm reliably identifying four of the "Big Five" human personality traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, and neuroticism.

In a statement from UniSA, Senior Lecturer of Psychology Dr. Tobias Loetscher explained that this research establishes a meaningful link between our eye motions and our innate and learned characteristics:

This research provides opportunities to develop robots and computers so that they can become more natural, and better at interpreting human social signals.

Eye-tracking will allow VR/MR creators to have access to an unprecedented level of usage analytics — not only they’ll know exactly what users have looked at or ignored throughout an experience, they’ll also be able to accurately measure engagement through pupil tracking.

You may have heard that human pupils dilate on physical attraction: but it goes much further than that. Pupil expansion betrays not only physical attraction, but also mental strain and emotional engagement. It can even go as far as to predict actions of a user seconds before they do it (explored and explained in detail in my article about the future of immersive education).

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessedamiani/2018/07/28/eye-tracking-used-to-determine-personality-traits-in-new-study/#286f6f4978f5