The Acagamic

Background Information

When going on the prowl for a new article, the young academic researcher, who is not too familiar with all the big names, research venues and journals typically starts their research looking the desired topic up in books, wikipedia (or other dictionaries) and most recently also in blogs (which happen to be increasingly written by academics in their spare time). Since I started adapting that practice a while ago for fields in which I lack proficiency, I thought why not share this idea. As an academic, you usually often want to give back to the community that nurtures you. Therefore, I would like to present my top ten of blogs that deal with eye tracking (often in a research context). It has to be noted that such a list is always highly subjective and may only be to my own gusto. If your blog is not on that list and you feel it should be, feel free to leave your URL and a comment. Without further ado, here goes my personal top ten:

The Top Ten List

1. Martin Tall on Gaze Interaction. Martin is a PhD student in HCI at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark and blogs about all things related to eye tracking and gaze interaction. Very inspiring and personal.
2. COGAIN. This is not so much a blog as more of news site from the Communication by gaze interaction researchers. This is where you find relevant conferences and articles on gaze interaction. Good starting place for researchers.
3. Eyetracking. Set your strategy. Unfortunately, this Chilean blog from Research AyerViernes is in Spanish, however you can let Google translate it for you automatically. Especially interesting to industry.
4. Eye tracking for behavioral analysis. A French company blog from Pertech (which you can also translate to English) shares funny articles and news from the world of eye tracking.
5. This ain’t no game! Samuel Almeida, who recently contacted me about my game usability slides, blogs about his thesis project “Eye movement analysis for augmenting video game development”, which is delightful and interesting. Good luck on your project, Samuel.
6. Eye Tools Blog. This is a blog about “design and content optimization through eye tracking” from the eye tools company, which has not been updated for a while.
7. The Eye Tracking Blog. Lots of short, incomplete information related to eye tracking. Older articles sometimes provide no references to the news stories. Unfortunately, the blog has a very anonymous feel to it as no authors are referenced, it almost feels like it is written by a search spider that regularly crawls google for eye tracking stuff.
8. Yellow Line. Matteo Penzo, who worked with eye tracking at the University of Rome before 2007, still has a few pieces of his work on his blog.
9. User Interface Engineering. Again, not really a blog, but a company site that has a few articles related to eye tracking.
10. Feng GUI. A blog about a crazy technology to generate eye tracking heatmaps without eye tracking. Amazing, geeky and interesting.

Let’s not forget that you can always come back here and read my articles about eye tracking.