Primary supervisor
Sarah GoodwinCo-supervisors
Background:
In our research we are reimagining the Control Room of the Future, where advanced data tools support better decision-making in complex environments like energy grid operations. A key focus of our research is understanding how operators interact visually with large-scale information displays. To do this, we use eye-tracking technology to capture detailed visual attention patterns, and synchronise it with workstation-level video and researcher notes.
During our continued research we have developed a toolkit for eye tracking analysis: Gazealytics. We use Gazealytics to support the analysis of eye-tracking data in context. Gazealytics is an open-source visual analytics toolkit for eye-tracking research, available here: https://github.com/gazealytics/gazealytics-master. It can help researchers synchronise and analyse eye-tracking data alongside other data streams such as video recordings and observer notes.
Aim/outline
During the project we aim to test the capabilities of our Pupil Labs Neon eye trackers in Meta VR headsets and investigate the integration of the data into Gazealytics. In this project you will be part of designing, developing and facilitating a user study based on a prior study which we will extra the data from and use this for the focus of designing and integrating 3D object analysis into Gazealytics.
URLs/references
Gazealytics - an opensource visual anaysis toolkit for eye tracking data: https://github.com/gazealytics/gazealytics-master
Our publications behind this is as follows:
(more researchers are using the toolkit for their analysis - their publications can be found on the github ):
Original paper and initial application demonstrating research gap and need:
Goodwin, S. et al. (2022) VETA: Visual eye-tracking analytics for the exploration of gaze patterns and behaviours, Visual Informatics, Volume 6, Issue 2, 2022, Pages 1-13, ISSN 2468-502X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visinf.2022.02.004.
(Includes 1 student intern as author)
Application paper - expanding the tool kit:
Chen, K. T., ... & Goodwin, S. (2023). Gazealytics: A Unified and Flexible Visual Toolkit for Exploratory and Comparative Gaze Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2023 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (pp. 1-7). Preprint available at arXiv:2303.17202.
(Includes 2 prior interns, stayed on as RAs, as authors)
A short paper focusing on advancing features for our control room study:
Zhang, Y, ... & Goodwin, S (2025) Streamlining Eye-Tracking and Observational Data for Field Study Visual Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2025 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 98, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715669.3725880
(Includes 5 student interns as authors)
A recent paper evaluating Gazealytics approach:
K. -T. Chen ... & Goodwin (2026) "Integrating Visual Analytics into Eye Tracking Workflows: A Longitudinal Field Study," 2026 IEEE 19th Pacific Visualization Conference (PacificVis), Sydney, Australia, 2026, pp. 85-95, doi: 10.1109/PacificVis68791.2026.00015.
(Includes 1 prior intern, stayed on as RA, as author)
Required knowledge
We're looking for honours or minor thesis student who is passionate about novel tools that help people understand complex data.
Ideally, you have:
- Interest in eye tracking, new technologies and HCI;
- Ability to research independently as well as be a team member;
- Comfortable working with different data formats and multimedia (video) synchronisation;
- Good JavaScript skills and experience with data visualisation (D3.js or similar) would be useful;
- Familiarity with GitHub and collaborative coding workflows;
- At least basic knowledge of research methods.