Evaluation of indoor guidance systems using eye tracking in an immersive virtual environment

In this article, we present a novel method for evaluating guidance systems using an immersive virtual environment in combination with a mobile eye tracking system. Accurate measurements of position, locomotion, viewing frustum, and gaze are captured in the virtual environment. They are applied to the projection of an attention map onto the virtual 3D environment for visualizing the fixation in the environment as well as the amount of time objects were fixated. To demonstrate the method's applicability, we conducted an experiment with 24 participants evaluating a guidance system of a large public infrastructure. The results show that our method allows for the creation of attention maps as well as for the identification of objects of interest based on eye tracking.