How do we look at film, television, on-line video or real-life events?

How does looking influence what we see, remember and feel?

These are the questions the DIEM project (Dynamic Images and Eye Movements) seek to answer as they investigate what drives human visual perception and how our eyes scan and sample images.

Understanding what a viewer notices and where their eyes fixate helps breakdown how we experience a film. As filmmakers this information provides valuable insight on the kind of visual data audiences observe. Research from the DIEM project reveals our gaze lingers on faces, hands, objects, movement and light and especially the sudden appearance of these things. A particular study on continuity helped further investigate how viewers missed discontinuity when their gaze is fixated on more important things. This was achieved through props changing colour/location, costume changes, staging irregularities etc.

How does it work?

“Using state-of-the-art eye tracking facilities, the eye-tracking data records the X and Y coordinates for each eye per millisecond in combination with a range of eye-movement measures. For each person, this produces over 1000 lines of data (in eight columns), per second. To analyze this output, DIEM has developed a tool called Computational Algorithms for Representation and Processing of Eye-movements (CARPE). CARPE can create dynamic heat-maps that visually represent a cluster analysis of where people are looking. The software also quantifies this behaviour, allowing us to determine the various visual features and events that lead to a stronger consensus on where to look (a tighter cluster) among viewers.”

The eye mapping video of There Will Be Blood is a prime example of how tightly focused our gaze is whilst watching a film and how viewers look in a similar place most of the time. The study included 11 viewers, separately watching the film.