Chapters authored
Mobile Eye Tracking in Landscape Architecture: Discovering a New Application for Research on Site
This chapter presents the process of establishing a laboratory for mobile eye tracking focussing on real-world, open-space environments within the field of landscape architecture at the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences (D) as well as the latest results from the feasibility study ‘Point de Vue’, which defines the basis for qualitative interaction analyses in landscape architecture. Eye tracking is a tool that has been used extensively in the domains of psychology, marketing, usability and user experience in remote and mobile applications, but has rarely been used in real-world open spaces because of technical limitations. To check the possibilities of mobile eye tracking as a new application in open spaces, several exploratory tests and a feasibility study with long-term experiments have been carried out in urban settings as well as in world famous parks such as ‘Grosser Garten’ in Hannover (D) and ‘Stourhead’ in Wiltshire (GB). These experiments have shown extraordinary results that enable us to use mobile eye tracking as a new tool in open space research to gain knowledge about how people act, react and interact in open-space environments. Being able to see and understand what catches one’s eye and the response to it will be a guide to better design.
Part of the book: Landscape Architecture