Eye tracking without the expensive hardware: meet EyeReader

Ever wonder exactly what people look at when they scroll through a website or examine a new product? Eye tracking can give you meaningful insights into their focus. It highlights what grabs someone's attention, holds their interest, or gets passed over. That’s powerful if you’re exploring decision-making processes or consumer preferences.

Traditionally, eye tracking calls for specialized hardware. But that’s not always practical or affordable. That’s where EyeReader comes in. It’s a webcam-based solution—part of FaceReader—that opens up eye tracking to anyone, anywhere.

How EyeReader measures your gaze

EyeReader was created as a simple, cost-friendly system within FaceReader that captures both a person’s gaze and emotional reactions. No fancy equipment needed. No complex setup guides. Just everyday devices that most people already own.

So, how does it work? A regular webcam streams the image, and the software pinpoints key landmarks on your face. Then it measures head pose—the tilt and angle of your head relative to the camera.

All this information goes into a pre-trained neural network. The network figures out a 3D gaze vector, which is visualized as a line extending from your eyes in the direction you’re looking.

Then you have calibration, in which you follow dots on a screen for a few moments. This tells the software exactly how your gaze lines up with the display. This way, EyeReader can track where your eyes are moving.

| You may also like these blogs posts about how to measure audience engagement or how attention detection is validated in FaceReader.

How accurate is EyeReader?

To understand how well EyeReader performs compared to dedicated eye tracking devices, we ran a validation study with a 32-dot calibration task. We included 17 participants and measured people's gaze with EyeReader and a Tobii Nano eye tracking device.

In natural light, EyeReader’s on-screen gaze predictions averaged just a 2.4 cm deviation. That’s about 5.2% of a typical desktop screen, or around 113.6 pixels. EyeReader was also tested on smaller areas of the screen, like 1/16th of the total space. It achieved an accuracy of about 96%.

The balance between flexibility and accuracy

Expensive hardware eye trackers can reach an accuracy of above 99% for 1/16th of the screen, so yes, they’re still more precise. If you need to track minute eye movements in a strictly controlled lab, you might want to stick with hardware eye trackers. But if you don’t need ultra-high precision, EyeReader’s flexibility might be worth the trade-off.

Because it's not just easier and more cost-effective to set up—EyeReader also supports you when you want to collect data remotely. Ideal when your participants are located across different cities or even continents.

Practical uses in real-world settings

EyeReader is also the perfect choice when your research needs a more natural or comfortable environment. Want people to navigate an online store at home while you see exactly where they look? No problem.

Here are a few other ways to use EyeReader:

• Usability tests: Spot where website users get confused or where they focus on the most
• Product design: Understand how packaging draws attention to a shelf or a webstore
• Psychology studies: Collect data from large, diverse samples without getting everyone into a lab
• Advertising research: See which parts of an ad captures people's attention

Better insights in attention

EyeReader is the ideal solution for professionals looking for quick and easy insights into attention or researchers who want to test their participants remotely.

It might not beat specialized devices for ultra-high accuracy, but EyeReader is more than capable of revealing where someone is looking and for how long. Plus, you can capture genuine behaviors across different locations, which makes your findings a lot more realistic.

With EyeReader, you’re one step closer to understanding what attracts people's attention. And this insight makes a world of difference in design, marketing, and product innovation.

| Pssst! Curious about the latest innovations in FaceReader? Get a sneak peek into the upcoming release of FaceReader 10!