Eye Tracking in Practice: The True Impact on Research & Innovation

Hi everyone, I'm Ashley McManus, Senior Director of Global Marketing at SmartEye. Welcome to the Human-Centric AI Podcast, where each episode we interview thought leaders doing cutting-edge work in the AI space. A little bit about us. SmartEye was founded over 20 years ago and have been known for developing some of the world's most sophisticated eye-tracking systems.

In recent years, we've expanded our technology and are now known as the global leader in human insight AI, tech that understands, supports, and predicts human behavior in complex environments. We are bridging the gap between humans and machines for a safe and sustainable future. Our multimodal software and hardware solutions provide unprecedented human insight into automotive and behavioral research, supported also by Affectiva and iMotions, companies we acquired in 2021. Today, we feature our own Brad Hayes, SmartEye's Regional Sales Director of Southeast U.

S., who has been with the organization for over 10 years. I invited him to talk today about understanding customer needs and concerns, SmartEye solutions and differentiators, and ROI impact for our customers. Let's listen in to learn more.

Okay, hi everyone, and thank you for joining us today. With me, I have our own Brant Hayes, Sales Director, Southeast US at SmartEye. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you, Ashley.

Awesome. So let's talk about you and your role at SmartEye. What does a typical day look like for you in terms of working with clients? Yeah, thanks.

So yes, I'm a sales director or area sales manager for the southern half of the U.S. I'm consistently engaging our customer base to ensure a positive experience, share progress, and also do a lot with gathering feedback with them or from them so that we can use that to improve our technology and our offerings moving forward. I'm constantly traveling and also in the field a lot to visit customers, conduct live demonstrations, and also share our success with new prospects that we get either through conferences or lead campaigns and visits and stuff.

Nice. And how long have you been with SmartEye? I've been with SmartEye going on just past 10 years. So this summer will be 11 years.

Wow. Awesome. So what are some common misconceptions about eye tracking technology that you have encountered in that time? Yeah, it's, you know, it's come a long way in the past and as far as it has.

But, you know, I guess just in general, from a performance perspective, I think a lot of prospects, particularly those without eye tracking experience, believe that, you know, it's just kind of plug and play and it's just supposed to work. You know, 100% accuracy all the time, pinpoint accuracy, no latency, all that kind of stuff. And find out real quick that that's not how it goes. So I also think it can be perceived to be very time consuming and way too much of a task when it comes to setting up, calibrating the system as such, particularly in between subjects when they're doing experiments.

And I also think another misconception is that eye trackers have a lot of difficulty working with a lot of different ethnicities and demographics and, you know, other things in terms that can be problematic, like eyewear or beards or, you know, makeup, long hair. different shapes and sizes of faces and whatnot, you know, so, and they can be for some eye trackers, they can be problematic. But I think, you know, the different solutions out there propose different solutions to these types of issues Got it Okay so I want to talk about understanding customer needs and concerns So let start with you know what are the top concerns or challenges that customers have when they first inquire about eye tracking technology and how does SmartEye address those concerns?

Yeah, so I think first and foremost, and this is just, you know, at the end of the day, what they're purchasing is good data. That's what they're after, good quality data. And I think that's their biggest concern is, you know, what is the quality of data that SPARNA is able to provide? What's the availability of the data?

You know, how much data am I going to be losing over time during these experiments? How much time am I going to be spent, you know, doing post-processing and things like that? With the robustness of our multi-camera system, we minimize data loss as you pretty much are always being tracked by one of the cameras. I think the leading factor contributing to the quality of our data is our 3D world model and all the data fields that are being measured to one static point in the same world coordinate system.

That's huge in our system. And I think this really simplifies the post-processing time, decreases the time that's spent significantly. Awesome. Now, is there a specific problem that customers have, you know, hoping that eye tracking will solve?

And how do you see Smart Eye Solution as standing out and solving those problems compared to other alternatives on the market? I think what they're really looking for is just, you know, trying to do eye tracking. I mean, whether it's eye tracking or any sensors, really in the most unintrusive way possible. You know, whether that be from comfort of the subject to time that's being spent setting up and doing post-processing and such.

And I think our remote approach really helps out with that. Definitely. Now, when it comes to understanding user behavior, what would you say the most common challenges are from customers? I think that understanding the level of human behavior, they want to understand which centers to use.

I think when they start to dive into this more, they learn what they can and can't do with some of these sensors, and it really starts to change the requirements and what they're looking for. So I think another challenge for them is understanding what's involved with synchronizing and processing all this data that they collect as well. I think that really has some impacts on some of their decisions for some of the solutions they choose. Okay.

So like you said, you've been with SmartEye for over 10 years now. what would you say the most frequently asked question you get from customers is and how do you typically answer it? Number one, I would say, you know, when we're, you know, doing the demonstrations and stuff like that, you know, they see us setting it up and they see all these cameras and cables and all this kind of stuff. And I think that, you know, one of the biggest questions is, you know, hey, you know, what's the learning curve to set this up and to use it?

You know, the calibration time for each subject and everything. And yeah, it looks like that. But, you know, we talked to them about it. You know, we come on site for two days.

We do the installation. We can talk to you about, you know, moving it into other sims or other applications and train them on how to use it. And also talk about our access to our tech support, which they have for one year on the time of purchase, which is huge. You know, our tech support is very readily available.

They answer within 24 hours. They can help you remotely. If needed be, we can come on site. So we have you covered.

So, yeah. Perfect. So let's move on to solutions, benefits, key differentiators. How does SmartEyes technology uniquely address these different challenges we've talked about compared to other solutions that are out there?

I think the first one is our multi-camera remote system. We're the only one, the only solution in the marketplace that has the multi-camera functionality. And that really helps with the reliability of the data and minimizes the amount of data that's lost. Number three is our static 3D coordinate system in the world model We talked about that already And the third is our lighting We use controlled lighting from our own IR sources It's a very high intensity, short duration.

We have filters on our cameras. It filters out the ambient light. So really, we create our own controlled light in the environment, which really helps us do our thing. Okay.

Awesome. So we do have a lot of different, I guess, use cases and people approaching us with different ways they want to use these solutions. How does SmartEye's eye tracking system adapt to the unique needs of these different industries, such as, you know, automotive research, aviation, market research? How does that, how do we adapt to each of them?

Yeah, I mean, when you're talking about these different types of applications, automotive, you know, aviation, you know, it doesn't matter if it's a single screen environment, computer or flight deck or an in-vehicle or a simulator or what. So, you know, with the flexibility and the scalability of our multi-camera system, the positions allows us to basically approach each individual application on a case-by-case basis. You know, we can understand the requirements in terms of, you know, field of view, desired accuracy, what specific areas are you trying to get good accuracy, and then we can customize and configure the system to align with these needs.

Okay. Now, and I think you touched on this a little bit, but just giving you an opportunity to expand if you want. But what technical or operational challenges would customers face when implementing eye tracking? And how does someone like SmartEye come in and simplify this integration process?

I think we're different from a lot because we do everything from a remote perspective. But some of the challenges that we encounter or they think that we're going to encounter from a hardware perspective is just limited areas or limited access that we can put cameras and put cables. But we have a very small form tractor when it comes to the cameras. We also have very flexible cables and we have the ability to hide these very well and reasonable freedom of placement with the hardware as well really helps us in these types of situations.

From a software perspective, we have the ability to collect and output the data over UDP, TCP, and we can do this live. Also, we have an API, which allows for easy integration with other types of softwares. We also have the ability to remote control the software through an RPC so we can build integrations and applications around it as well. Nice.

Very cool. So could you share an example of a customer success story or a testimonial where SmartEyes Tech made a big impact? Well, most of my stuff is highly classified, but without naming one specific customer, I'll just say that most of the systems I sell are fit for purpose for flight deck and in-vehicle studies within military, government, university customers. These are known to be the most complex and challenging environments for eye trackers.

Our multi-camera solutions are the only eye tracker on the market that can meet the demanding requirements from these types of applications. So some of my customers that have multiple systems and are very happy with them with our solutions include FAA, U.S. Army, Honeywell, University of Alabama, Birmingham, BTTI, just to name a few.

Nice. Very cool. So I'd love to talk about product features and ROI impact. So what features or innovations in SmartEyes Tech have had the most significant impact on customers' ROI or product outcomes?

Yeah, when I started SmartEye in 2014, we had just come out and released our automatic profiling process, which really streamlined the profiling process and didn't have to do all the different pictures and different positions of the head and whatnot. And that really helped. So with the automated tracking, automatically finding the face and starting the eye tracking versus manually plotting the features of the face, etc. This coupled with our fast calibration process really minimizes the setup times between the participants So it supplies the output data and post as well Nice Yeah you might have answered my next question but I say it anyway Are there any recent product improvements or new features that clients are especially excited about I would say other than the point that we've already talked about, I would say that our recent acquisitions with FXEV and iMotions, we're really excited about those.

We're continuously working on tightening the integration together with the iMotion suite. So we're starting to see some of these modules and some of these capabilities, such as facial expressions and things like that, trickle down into research instruments, which we're really excited about and become more of the Smart Eye Pro output data. So now we're able to do other things like jazzyness output and also tracking with medical face masks and things like that. All right.

So I love to end on the future of eye tracking and the different industry trends that you see. How do you really see eye tracking evolving over the next few years? And how would you say that's my nice position to lead that change? I mean, going to a lot of these automotive conferences and hearing the different types of research that's being done these days, I think there's a lot of different studies that are being done to figure out, especially what's going on with the U.

S. There's the legalization of the controlled substances in a lot of different states and things like that. There's a lot of research going on on different methods to be able to detect intoxicated drivers, whether it be from or other substances. And I think eye tracking is being used at the forefront of this research and is very important to that research.

And I think SmartEye is very well positioned in the automotive market, as we already know. And we're doing our research ourselves on this topic as well. So, and our system is very well equipped for this type of research. Awesome.

So last question I had, let's say that there is someone listening that wants to get started with eye tracking. They don't really know where to start. what advice would you have for prospective customers who are considering using eye tracking technology for the first time? Yeah, I would say to really do your homework.

There's a lot of different types of solutions out there. OK, understanding your solution and your objectives, you know, have some clear objectives on what you're trying to achieve and what you're looking for. Takes a lot of patience with eye tracking, not just eye tracking, but pretty much any type of biosensors in general. I think there's many different types of options out in the marketplace with a very, very wide range of costs.

And I guess if I say one thing and it's the most important is once you come up with your requirements and what your needs are, don't sacrifice any of these for costs. Okay. I think that's a big mistake a lot of people make and they end up having to come back and purchase something more expensive in the future that they should have got from the first place. Yeah, definitely.

All right, cool. Well, that's all I had for you, Brandt. It was a pleasure speaking with you. And thank you once again for making the time to speak with me today.

Yeah, thanks for your time. I always learn something new when I speak with SmartEyes eye tracking experts who have been in this industry for decades in many cases. I thought Brandt had some great advice to those looking to implement eye tracking in terms of what to look for and how to overcome some integration or setup challenges. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

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Thank you.