3D-DesktopEye: A Desktop-Based Eye-Tracking System for Facility Management
Yangming Shi, Jing Du · Construction Research Congress 2022 · 2022
Understanding the attentional patterns of construction professionals in design, construction, and facilities management processes is critical to identifying the performance bottlenecks and improving the current workflow designs in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Facility Management (AEC/FM) industry. Recent developments in eye-tracking technologies have attracted an increasing attention of construction scholars as it is an effective tool for attentional analysis. However, the existing monitor-mounted eye trackers are designed for tracking gaze focus on 2D screens (such as attentions during a 2D drawing review) and thus are limited for understanding attentional patterns in 3D model reviews. To track gaze focus in 3D environments, scholars have to use expensive eye trackers integrated with glasses or headset displays such as Virtual Reality headsets. As an alternative, this paper proposes an effective solution for tracking gaze focus in 3D model reviews on 2D screens using the regular monitor-mounted eye trackers. The proposed 3D Desktop-Based Eye-Tracking System called “3D-DesktopEye” leverages the eye-tracking function of the Unity Game engine and a set of geometric conversations to project the 2D eye-tracking points into virtual 3D models. As a result, it can track the focus points of a user looking at a 3D model on a 2D screen. We tested the 3D-DesktopEye system in a facility management scenario—a pipe maintenance task. We also compared the effectiveness of the proposed 3D-DesktopEye system with the traditional 2D eye-tracking system. The results confirmed the usability and feasibility of the 3D-DesktopEye, and the proposed 3D-DesktopEye can help the user achieve better task performance.