Mobile eye tracking in the real world: Best practices

Abstract

As research on human behavior, such as spatial navigation, increasingly adopts naturalistic settings, establishing best practices for such experiments becomes essential. Although virtual reality offers a bridge between laboratory control and real-world complexity, it does not fully capture the experiential richness of real-world environments. Here, we present a demonstration of a mobile eye-tracking study conducted in a large-scale, outdoor urban environment, featuring unconstrained, long-duration free exploration and outside-pointing tasks. Using the city of Limassol, Cyprus, as our testbed, we showcase the feasibility of collecting high-quality mobile eye-tracking, head orientation, and GPS data "in the wild," capturing a wide range of natural behavior with minimal experimental constraints. Based on this experience, we provide a set of best practices tailored to the logistical and methodological challenges posed by complex, real-world urban settings, challenges unlikely to arise in traditional indoor or highly controlled environments. Although these recommendations have general relevance, we exemplify them in the context of spatial navigation research. By establishing methodological standards for studies at this scale, we aimed to encourage and inform future research into naturalistic human behavior outside the laboratory.