EyeFIX: An Interactive Visual Analytics Interface for Eye Movement Analysis

Eye movements are closely related to the cognitive processes and often act as a window to the brain and mind. To facilitate a window to the brain using eye movements, we propose EyeFIX, an interactive visual analytics interface. Our interface currently focuses on processing gaze movements to generate the two most prominent events, fixations, and saccades which are used in a large part of the eye movement literature. Our interface has multiple interactive widgets that allow the users to choose the algorithm and tune its hyper parameters that control how fixations and saccades are generated. It has four major visualizations: (1) A Gaze Plot to showcase the gaze movement of each participant, (2) a Fixation Plot that helps to identify regions of the stimulus which are of interest to a particular participant, (3) a Heat Map to study the denser regions of fixation and regions which the participant frequently visited, and (4) a Timeline Visualization to assist in having a closer look at temporal regions of interest. We design a set of brushing and linking operators that allow users to interactively control all the visualizations to dig deeper in both, the spatial and temporal domains. We demonstrate the applicability of our interface with datasets obtained by human subjects viewing naturalistic stimuli while performing various viewing tasks, including visual exploration, visual search, and prolonged visual fixation.