With sme high-tech equipment, a group of volunteers and dedicated Ball State University staff members are currently conducting a project that will help determine the way people watch television.
Project Manager Bill Vaughn and Director of Testing and Assessment Mike Bloxham of the Center for Media Design are heading up an experiment that will determine how people react to pop-up promos that appear during television programs. They do so by using a room full of new equipment that accurately tracks the movement of an eye within one seventeen-hundredth of a second.
"We figured we were going to have to do a pilot project," Vaughn said. "And since we're going to use the equipment, we figured that we might as well find the answers to a few things we wanted to know."
"We've invested a good deal of money to make this work and we're very excited that we're getting to the point where this could make a real difference," Bloxham said. "We can better understand how advertisements work and help better the reputation of Ball State. ... What we're now able to do is accurately track where the eyes move, where they stay and how long they stay there for."
The project, currently being conducted only at Ball State, involves using a camera mounted to a headset to track the eye movement of a volunteer while the volunteer watches a 15-minute segment of a television program which includes a commercial break and pop-up promos. The camera and a series of computers then matches up the eye's movement and places a visible sight on another computer screen, allowing researchers to see exactly where the volunteer is looking on the screen. Afterwards, volunteers participate in brief interviews regarding the material they just viewed.
The project has been under way since July 18. Since that time, Vaughn has seen varying responses to the program and promotional ads.
"I wasn't sure what to expect," Vaughn said. "I thought attitudes would be negative, but they're mixed."
The goal is for the project to test up to 20 volunteers who will watch the television program from a couch 10 feet away from the television screen.
"It's a good sample of people," Bloxham said. "Medical eye-tracking projects usually consist of groups of about 10 people. We have 20."
Typical eye tracking projects test their volunteers at a much shorter distance; however, this is not a typical project as there has not been much research conducted on the subject.
"Every foot makes it more difficult," Bloxham said.
"We knew going into this, it would be possible but extremely difficult," he said. "Luckily, we've had some time to play around with the technology, and we can look back on the early days of the research and laugh."
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