The Museum Gaze: Empowering Mobile Eye Tracking to Investigate Viewing Behaviour in Relation to Painting and Sculpture in Different Exhibition Displays1

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Enkelejda Kasneci
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 464052890

More than in everyday life, in the art museum attention is focused through the eye. In order to understand the behaviour of visitors, i.e. their responses to artworks and their display, it is crucial to record and analyse the visitors’ mostly unconscious eye movements in relation to their self-reports. Recent technical advances in eye tracking technology have made it easier to record eye movements in naturalistic settings. However, to date, most eye tracking studies on art perception have been conducted in laboratories, using two-dimensional reproductions of artworks. While these studies delivered substantial results, they have severe limitations: a) The difference between an original artwork and its reproduction is not only referential but essential, b) it has not yet been possible to analyse three-dimensional objects such as sculptures with viewers moving around them, and c) the context of a museum has demonstrably major effects on art perception that cannot be studied in a lab setting. To overcome these limitations, this project will use mobile eye tracking to investigate the beholding of artworks from different mediums (paintings vs. sculptures) under natural conditions, i.e. in the museum. The project goals are: 1) to study the relational gaze, i.e. how visitors alternate between looking at single artworks, written information such as exhibit labels, and other objects of interest in the museum space; 2) to study the medium-specific gaze, i.e. how visitors behave when beholding three-dimensional artworks such as sculptures and to what extent this differs from looking at paintings; 3) to empower mobile eye tracking (MET) methodology for the art museum, i.e. improve and develop new open source software tools for data collection (in combination with indoor position tracking) and data analysis (including automatic data annotation and 3D mapping) that also enable future applications in curatorial work. To realise this project, we bring together complementary expertise and skills from art history, museum and visitor studies, and computer science. This collaboration builds upon many years of close collaboration between our research groups (see 3.3 and 3.4) and offers benefits to all involved disciplines (see 9). While there is variety of relevant perspectives and literature in each discipline, the strict word limit restrains the extent of disciplinary discussions in this proposal.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Raphael Rosenberg