2003 we purchased the first Tobii eye tracker ever sold to a commercial organisation. We were delighted and wanted to see how far the technology could be pushed so we tried it with Tom who was just two years old at the time:

We were so pleased with the ET17 that it wasn’t until later when we reviewed the footage we noticed that Tom made a considered decision from, seconds 31 to 39.

He starts by looking at Laa-laa:

Then subvocalizes “errrrrrr” as he considers all the Teletubbies:

Po:

Before deciding on Laa-laa some four seconds later:

He then considers Dipsy:

And sticks with his choice of Laa-laa:

The realisation that we could literally see into the minds of users as they made decisions was a revelation. We set about turning the revelation into a proven methodology carrying out research in conjunction with Lancaster University in 2004 to validate the methodology we called PEEP (Post Experience Eye Track Protocol). We published the findings in 2007 at HCI:

Eye tracking gives insight into the mind of a consumer that the consumer themselves could not articulate. At THiNK we are pioneering the use of eye tracking to make all communications more effective, taking what we honed in the online world, (where many things are measurable, in exquisite detail, in real time) and applying it to offline communications.