(11-May-2010) The Eye Has It: How Student-Geologists Learn in the Field

The Eye Has It: How Student-Geologists Learn in the Field

RIT-UR team seeks to parlay data into virtual field trips

Photo by Jeff Pelz

A group of students from the University of Rochester wear eye trackers while exploring Badwater Basin in California’s Death Valley National Park. Scientists from RIT and UR are teaming up to learn how beginning geologists gain expertise in the field and whether the experience can be simulated through virtual field trips.

by Susan Gawlowicz, May 10, 2010 —

Sending 13 people into the wild wearing eye trackers was a risky idea.

“There was a chance you wouldn’t get good data,” says Jeff Pelz, professor in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science at Rochester Institute of Technology. “There was a chance it would be too confusing. There was a chance the signal would be completely hidden in noise. There was a chance it was just not a controlled enough experiment.”

Nevertheless, the National Science Foundation funded the five-year joint project between RIT and University of Rochester to explore—through eye movements—how novice geologists learn in the field. The project aims to improve the training of future geoscientists and create interest in a field experiencing low enrollment despite international concern about energy resources, climate change, earthquakes and volcanic hazards.

The backdrop for the first field trip in the study was a nine-day excursion, March 7–15, connected to an introductory geology course, “Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Mountain Ranges in California: A Field Quest,” taught by John Tarduno, a geophysicist at the UR.

UR cognitive scientist Robert Jacobs leads the overall project. He tapped his RIT colleagues Pelz and Mitchell Rosen to provide the technological component of the study. RIT, which received nearly half of the $2 million NSF grant, is conducting the eye tracking and analysis, and the audio and visual capture of the natural scenery.

Pelz and alumnus Jason Babcock, tracked the eye movements of 10 UR students and three experts observing geological formations from San Francisco to Yosemite National Park. The subjects wore a three-pound backpack developed by Babcock’s company, Positive Science, containing two DVRs, donned special glasses equipped with two tiny cameras—one pointed at the their right eye, the other at the observed scene, and a wide-brimmed lifeguard hat to block sunlight from the cameras.

Pelz and Babcock collected nearly 2 terabytes of data and broke new ground tracking a large group outdoors in the sunlight for significant amounts of time. Analyzing the data, it is clear that it was worth the risk. “One of the exciting things about looking at people’s eye movements is that it gives us access to a level of thought that people can’t describe verbally,” Pelz says.

Rosen and imaging science doctoral student Brandon May came away from the trip with 2 terabytes worth of visual and aural data and many “firsts” associated with their efforts as well. They were responsible for capturing the scenery through high-resolution panoramic stills and hemispherical video and still photography, as well as the audio component to aid in analysis.

“The ability to do what we did is very much a matter of storage and computing capacity, battery capacity—everything has come together,” says Rosen, a professor in the Center for Student Innovation and the Munsell Color Science Laboratory in the Carlson Center for Imaging Science. “I’m not sure if it would have been doable last year.”

The project introduces a new area for exploring differences between novices and experts, and a new way to study how people absorb information from their surroundings. Another component of the project is the virtual field trip in which novices view imagery captured from the trip in an immersive or a semi-immersive environment. Eye movements of students experiencing the virtual field trip will be compared to their counterparts’ in the field.

For RIT, the study also represents an early collaborative effort involving the Center for Student Innovation. “The project incorporates surround capture and presentation for a field trip based on immersive imaging techniques that the center’s former director Ian Gatley and I had been working on for several years,” Rosen says.

Original Article can be viewed here: http://www.rit.edu/news/?v=47600