VITALSE: Visualizing Eye Tracking and Biometric Data

Abstract

Recent research in empirical software engineering is applying techniques from neurocognitive science and breaking new grounds in the ways that researchers can model and analyze the cognitive processes of developers as they interact with software artifacts. However, given the novelty of this line of research, only one tool exists to help researchers represent and analyze this kind of multimodal biometric data. While this tool does help with visualizing temporal eyetracking and physiological data, it does not allow for the mapping of physiological data to source code elements, instead projecting information over images of code. One drawback of this is that researchers are still unable to meaningfully combine and map physiological and eye tracking data to source code artifacts. The use of images also bars the support of long or multiple code les, which prevents researchers from analyzing data from experiments conducted in realistic settings. To address these drawbacks, we propose VITALSE, a tool for the interactive visualization of combined multi-modal biometric data for software engineering tasks. VITALSE provides interactive and customizable temporal heatmaps created with synchronized eyetracking and biometric data. The tool supports analysis on multiple les, user defined annotations for points of interest over source code elements, and high level customizable metric summaries for the provided dataset. VITALSE, a video demonstration, and sample data to demonstrate its capabilities can be found at http://www.vitalse.app.