Eye tracking has for some time been an accurate way to conduct research on users. Now Hawkeye plans to make it even easier to do so with the launch of its Hawkeye user research platform via iOS devices.
This shows how new kinds of businesses are possible with the onward march of technology in smartphones and tablets.
Hawkeye makes use of the new TrueDepth camera on Apple’s latest iPhone 11 and iPad products, which use three cameras to capture depth perception. That gives the cameras the ability to run software that accurately tracks the movement of your eyes.
But Matt Moss, founder of Hawkeye, said in an email that existing research tools leave a lot to be desired.
Above: Hawkeye captures where you are looking.
Traditional event-based analytics and always on-screen recorders only show which pages the user visits and what actions they perform, but not much more. Narrated user studies, on the other hand, only let you test with a tiny number of people and are incredibly tedious to watch.
Hawkeye is a new testing platform that uses eye tracking to give designers more insights into user behavior. Hawkeye uses the TrueDepth camera (the same tech that powers FaceID) to perform eye tracking without any extra hardware.
This lets researchers and designers understand how a user experiences a product, from what catches their attention to where they get confused. Because it’s all software based, gone are the days of frustrating and expensive eye-tracking hardware.
Moss started Hawkeye Labs in 2018, after he attended Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) as a student scholarship winners. After learning about ARKit’s advanced 3D face tracking features, he wondered if it would be possible to determine where a person is looking on their screen. Once he got the demo working, he posted it to Twitter, where it has been viewed over 350,000 times.
Since then, Moss has been building Hawkeye Labs (at least when he’s not in class at the University of California at Santa Barbara). The self-funded company has three employees and it is based in Santa Barbara, California, and San Francisco.
Author: Dean Takahashi
Source: Venturebeat
