For artists and designers, the location of the viewers gaze is pretty important. This equally applies to time-based and interactive work.
Film theorist David Bordwell discusses the eye movement of film viewers, highlighting work done by The DIEM project on a sequence from There Will Be Blood.
As Bordwell highlights, the striking discoveries are how erratic the eye movement initially seems – but then how co-ordinated the pattern of eye movement is across multiple viewers.
Film – like design for web and mobile – has developed it’s own grammar and conventions. It’s interesting to see when these can, and do, directly influence the attention of the viewer (or user).
Maybe someone could test this with the front facing camera on the iPhone? Maybe that would be a lot of hard work. This is what R & D budgets are for…
