The Museum Gaze

In the art museum, attention is focused through the eye. Recent technical developments have facilitated the recording of eye movements in natural environments. However, to date, most eye tracking studies on art perception have been conducted primarily in laboratories with two-dimensional reproductions. Mobile-eye-tracking (MET) studies in museums and exhibitions have not yet realised their full potential due to small sample sizes, constrained viewing conditions and laborious data analysis.

The research partners from the University of Vienna, Technical University of Munich and the Belvedere have set themselves the goal of providing innovative insights into gaze behaviour for art history, museum studies, and computer science. Four studies are being developed and conducted in close collaboration with the collection departments Middle Ages & Renaissance, Baroque, 18th & 19th Century and Contemporary Art. The used core method MET is complemented with subjective mappings, surveys as well as video and interaction analyses to holistically record the interactions and reactions to artworks and exhibition displays.

The goals of the project are 1.) to study the relational gaze, i.e. how visitors alternate between looking at single artworks, written information and other objects of interest; 2.) to study the medium-specific gaze, i.e. how visitors behave when beholding sculptures in contrast to paintings; and 3.) to empower MET for the art museum, i.e. to develop new open source solutions for automatic data annotation and 3D mapping including indoor position tracking.

The results of the studies promise significant results for the respective academic disciplines. For art history, which has often dealt only theoretically with the subject of eye movements, the use of various methods means the production of empirically grounded knowledge on art perception, especially on the perception of sculptures. Empirical data also provides museum studies with new perspectives and tools to answer curatorial and educational questions, when for instance various exhibition displays and art contextualisations are contrasted with the respective viewing behaviour. Computer science benefits from the density of the data obtained as well as the increasing complexity of the successive studies: MET and computer vision methods can thus be further developed for ecologically valid investigations of human behaviour.