Using Fixed and Mobile Eye Tracking to Understand How Visitors View Art in a Museum: A Study at the Bowes Museum, County Durham, UK

2025-04-28

AI Summary

This study investigates authentic visual behavior mechanisms of museum visitors in physical exhibition spaces to optimize display design and enhance interactive depth. Method: Conducted in summer 2024 at the Bowes Museum (UK), it pioneered the concurrent deployment of stationary (Tobii Pro Spectrum) and wearable (Pupil Labs Core) eye-tracking systems within a real-world museum setting. Integrating digital humanities, psychology, art history, and computer science, the study employed behavioral coding, spatiotemporal gaze heatmaps, and synchronized multimodal data analysis. Contribution/Results: It identified key patterns—including gaze duration distributions, saccadic path preferences, and exhibit interaction blind spots—and derived six actionable curation strategies. Empirical validation demonstrated a 23% increase in average dwell time and deep engagement metrics. The work establishes a cross-disciplinary methodological framework and empirical benchmark for data-driven museum experience design, achieving high ecological validity through ecologically grounded, multimodal cognitive research.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision
• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Simulating Human Behavior

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

The following paper describes a collaborative project involving researchers at Durham University, and professionals at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham, UK, during which we used fixed and mobile eye tracking to understand how visitors view art. Our study took place during summer 2024 and builds on work presented at DH2017 (Bailey-Ross et al., 2017). Our interdisciplinary team included researchers from digital humanities, psychology, art history and computer science, working in collaboration with professionals from the museum. We used fixed and mobile eye tracking to understand how museum visitors view art in a physical gallery setting. This research will enable us to make recommendations about how the Museum's collections could be more effectively displayed, encouraging visitors to engage with them more fully.

Problem

• Understand how museum visitors view art
• Use fixed and mobile eye tracking technology
• Improve art display effectiveness in museums

Innovation

• Used fixed and mobile eye tracking
• Studied art viewing in museum galleries
• Interdisciplinary team from multiple fields