ReadWriteWeb

You've seen those eye tracking heat maps that show where most people look first when they land on a web page - why not turn eye tracking technology like that into a replacement for your mouse or your finger on a touchscreen?

That's what a Danish startup called Senseye claims to be doing; they say they've got software for Android that uses the front-facing camera to track a user's eye movement and then uses that to control what happens on the phone's screen. They're not alone in working on doing that kind of work, either. Eye tracking could be a big new way that users interact with their devices.

French Internet research company Miratech has published research on how users interact with media presented in a physical newspaper versus an iPad. Miratech used eye-tracking technology to determine how users approached each medium and tested their memories to see if there was a difference in information retention.

Newspaper readers finished articles slightly quicker than iPad readers, who were more likely to skim content than to read it fully. Newspaper readers also had better retention, with 90% remembering what they read on paper compared to 70% of users of the iPad. See some of their videos after the jump.

Feng-GUI is an interesting heatmap creation service. Unlike click-based heatmaps from Crazy Egg, FuseStats, and others, Feng-GUI creates heatmaps based on where it thinks the human eye would most likely be attracted. Eye tracking is something that designers have long used to measure the effectiveness of advertising, or design more usable web sites (among other commercial applications). But Feng-GUI doesn't use real eye tracking, which would require that humans look at each object being measured and would hardly scale very well. Instead, the site uses an algorithm that attempts to guess what a real human would be most likely to look at.