Gaze Tracker

Editor's Notes

• #2 My name is Maddie Armitage and I am the ARTLENS Gallery Fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art. I would like to introduce Gaze Tracker, a featured interactive of ArtLens Exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
• #3 ArtLens Exhibition is grounded in rigorous pedagogy and unified by four broad themes; Composition, symbols, gesture and emotion and purpose. The goal of ArtLens Exhibition is to empower visitors to explore these themes through gameplay and master works of art from the CMA’s collection.
• #4 Gaze Tracker was designed as an interactive to explore the composition theme.
• #5 Research shows that museum visitors, on average, view an artwork for 2 seconds, spend 10 seconds reading the label, glance briefly back at the artwork, and move on. Gaze Tracker completely personalizes the art-viewing experience and will provide CMA with a better understanding about how our visitors actually look at art which could impact the future of exhibition design.
• #6 The following are goals for Gaze Tracker:   Understand how composition influences how we look at art Explore artists’ compositional choices and intent Introduce different types of composition Provide an entry point into understanding composition Encourage visitors to look longer and closer Propel visitors into the galleries Apply these toolsets Gaze Tracker is also aligned with some of our museum programming such as Close Looking Sessions led by our Education department which are designed as tours where visitors spend over 30min with 1-2 works of art.
• #7 At Gaze Tracker, you can dock your device to save artwork. You sit in front of a monitor and look at a blue dot for two seconds so the interactive can calibrate with your eyes. A random artwork from the collection appears on the screen and you have 15 seconds to look at it. Eye-tracking technology reveals the path your eyes took while looking at the artwork. It shows you first looked and where you looked the longest and describes the artist’s intent. And what’s really cool is that this information is compared with results from other visitors so you can see how your own results matched up with others. There is a large video projection above the monitor that shows also shows your results. At the end, you can see the artwork information and gallery location so it’s easy to find in the galleries using the app.
• #8 In preliminary data collection has shown visitors spend about 76 seconds of engagement per artwork. We will continue to gather data about the experience at Gaze Tracker that will help us understand and share how visitors look at art. Thank you for the opportunity to share Gaze Tracker with you all.