Bowes Museum introduces eye-tracking to optimise its displays

The Bowes Museum in County Durham today begins a project which will track the eyes of visitors as they make their way around its displays.

The research project is being conducted in partnership with Durham University, and is hoped to lead to an improved visitor experience as it informs changes to the way the museum displays its pictures.

The specialist eye-tracking glasses record the eye movements of visitors during their journey, and will present data including the length of time that a visitor’s gaze dwells on an item or area.

Researchers from the University will be sited in the Museum’s entrance hall, where they’ll capture the movement data from 100 visitors who volunteer to take part in the research.

The participants will fill in a questionnaire when they return the glasses and then specialists will explore the distinction between memory and the physical reality of the gallery experience.

There will be a secondary part to the project, which will be carried out at the University, where 50 volunteers will take part in a fixed eye-tracking experiment that tests the usefulness of existing label information about an object, which will look at how it could be rewritten or redesigned to give visitors a better aesthetic experience or improved understanding of the work.

Vicky Sturrs, The Bowes Museum’s Director of Programmes and Collections, said the project is hope to create “a much clearer understanding of what visitors really do like, what they actually look at, what they don’t see and what their journey through the picture galleries is really like.

Professor Andy Beresford, from Durham University’s School of Modern Languages and Culture who is leading the eye-tracking team, added: ”By looking at the data gathered from the two experiments we’ll be able to make recommendations on how and in what ways the visitor experience could be improved by remodelling and recontextualising the artworks on show in the Picture Galleries at The Bowes Museum.”