It was during the 2011 Shopper Marketing Conference in Sydney, Australia when I met two groups offering this kind of service.
The first was EYE (www.eyecorp.com). Their eye tracking device was a bit big and the receiver console was bulky --- you have to hold it with both hands. I tried it on and noticed that I didn't really mind as I walked around the exhibit area. I was looking at the things I would normally look at, I wasn't really distracted by the device.
I realized that typical advertising research are designed to find out what consumers are thinking about communication, messages and impressions. But we rarely figure out what parts of the ad they look at and which parts they don't look at. When I watched the playback of my "tour" around the exhibit area using the eye tracking device, I was amazed about the length of time I spent looking at communication materials and what counted as "visual noise" in my line of sight.
I was also invited to visit the Objective Eye Tracking booth and they lent me their eye tracker. It was lighter than Eyecorp's device and the receiver console was just a bit bigger than the prehistoric Palm handhelds. But I wasn't allowed to tour the entire exhibit hall wearing it so I just viewed a shelf with different products. A data collection program will show the results of the most, longest, least, etc. viewed products.
Although Objective Eye's Tobii glasses were lighter, it didn't really feel much different from Eyecorp's. But their selling point is that with a less conspicuous pair of glasses, at least the other shoppers won't notice the device. But if you ask me, big difference was the data collection console. It was much smaller and I could keep it in my pocket.
Eye tracking is a good way to augment data when it comes to shelf planogram, packaging designs and in store media placement. But I really think qualitative research is still a valuable tool to contextualize data and give more insightful conclusions.
