Don't Look at Me, I'm Wearing an Eyetracker!

Looking is a two-way process: we use our eyes to perceive the world around us, but we also use our eyes to signal to others. Eye contact in particular reveals much about our social interactions, and as such can be a rich source of information for context-aware wearable applications. But when designing these applications, it is useful to understand the effects that the head-worn eye-trackers might have on our looking behavior. Previous studies have shown that we moderate our gaze when we know our eyes are being tracked, but what happens to our gaze when we see others wearing eye trackers? Using gaze recordings from 30 dyads, we investigate what happens to a person’s looking behavior when the person with whom they are speaking is also wearing an eye-tracker. In the preliminary findings reported here, we show that people tend to look less to the eyes of people who are wearing a tracker, than they do to the eyes of those who are not. We discuss possible reasons for this and suggest future directions of study