Gaze-driven placement of items for proactive visual exploration

Recent advances in digital signage technology have improved the ability to visually select specific items within a group. Although this is due to the ability to dynamically update the display of items, the corresponding layout schemes remain a subject of research. This paper explores the sophisticated layout of items by respecting the underlying context of searching for favorite items. Our study begins by formulating the static placement of items as an optimization problem that incorporates aesthetic layout criteria as constraints. This is further extended to accommodate the dynamic placement of items for more proactive visual exploration based on the ongoing search context. Our animated layout is driven by analyzing the distribution of eye gaze through an eye-tracking device, by which we infer how the most attractive items lead to the finally wanted ones. We create a planar layout of items as a context map to establish association rules to dynamically replace existing items with new ones. For this purpose, we extract the set of important topics from a set of annotated texts associated with the items using matrix factorization. We also conduct user studies to evaluate the validity of the design criteria incorporated into both static and dynamic placement of items. After discussing the pros and cons of the proposed approach and possible themes for future research, we conclude this paper.