Museums Through the Visitor's Eyes: Eye Tracking and Museum Fruition

Understanding museum audiences and monitoring their experiences have long been at the core of empirical research, from several disciplinary angles. Yet, a very limited amount of studies have, to date, resorted to eye tracking as a tool to map visitors' gazes, their preferences and their difficulties in museum fruition. Eye tracking offers an objective window into audiences' perception and reception of a variety of stimuli, allowing the researcher to overcome many of the biases involved in qualitative empirical studies. This article presents the methodology used for two experiments carried out with eye tracking and other analytical tools at two different museums. It also focuses on the results obtained by the mixed-method investigations, with a view to promoting more systematic research in museum enjoyment with portable eye tracking technology.