iTraceVis: Visualizing Eye Movement Data Within Eclipse

The paper presents iTraceVis, an eye tracking visualization component for iTrace, a gaze-aware Eclipse plugin. The visualization component is designed to work with data generated from iTrace after an eye tracking session. iTrace provides us with an automatic mapping of raw eye gaze on corresponding source code elements according to their hierarchy in the abstract syntax graph even in the presence of scrolling and context switching between files. This feature provides us with the ability to visualize eye tracking data in large source code files and is not just restricted to visualize only a method at a time i.e., something that fits on the screen. Due to the enormous size and richness of data collected from the eye tracker, visualizations help both the researcher and the developer to comprehend what transpired during an eye tracking session. iTraceVis currently supports four visualization views - heat map, gaze skyline, static gaze map, and dynamic gaze map. In order to determine the usefulness of the visualizations, we conduct a pilot user study with 10 senior students. We present an existing eye-tracking developer session to the study participants and ask them a series of questions while they interacted with iTraceVis and its various views in Eclipse. The results indicate that the visualizations do indeed help users understand the visualized session represented by the data, and also provide insight into where the visualizations can be improved as part of future work.