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ET2Spatial – software for georeferencing of eye movement data

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Abstract

The paper focuses on the development of an open-source utility tool for the analysis of eye-tracking data recorded on interactive web maps. The tool simplifies the labor-intensive task of frame-by-frame analysis of screen recordings with overlaid eye-tracking data in the current eye-tracking systems. The tool's main functionality is to convert the screen coordinates of the participant's gaze to real-world coordinates and allow exports in commonly used spatial data formats. The paper explores the existing state-of-art in an eye-tracking analysis of dynamic cartographic products as well as the research and technology aiming at improving the analysis techniques. The developed software, called ET2Spatial, is tested in-depth in terms of performance and accuracy. The capabilities of GIS software for visualizing and analyzing recorded eye-tracking data are investigated. The tool aims to enhance the research capabilities in the field of eye-tracking in geovisualization.

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Notes

  1. https://github.com/minha94/ET2Spatial

  2. https://github.com/ondrejruzicka/maptrack

  3. https://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/md_help/html/mapb0iem.htm

  4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Mercator_projection

  5. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_map_tilenames

  6. www.eyetracking.upol.cz/tobii2spatial

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Funding

This study was done as part of the master thesis of first author, supported by the Erasmus + Programme of the European Union. The paper was also supported by the Internal Grant Agency of Palacký University Olomouc (grant number IGA_PrF_2022_027) and by the Ministry of Culture Czech Republic (grant number DG18P02OVV017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geoinformatics, Palacký University in Olomouc, 17. listopadu 50, 779 00, Olomouc, Czech Republic

    Minha Noor Sultan & Stanislav Popelka

  2. Department of Geoinformatics, Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Schillerstraße 30, 5020, Salzburg, Austria

    Josef Strobl

Authors
  1. Minha Noor Sultan
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  2. Stanislav Popelka
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  3. Josef Strobl
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Correspondence to Stanislav Popelka.

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The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

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Communicated by: H. Babaie

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Sultan, M.N., Popelka, S. & Strobl, J. ET2Spatial – software for georeferencing of eye movement data. Earth Sci Inform 15, 2031–2049 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-022-00832-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-022-00832-5

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