Wayfinding | geoGAZElab

10
Sep 25
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100th Anniversary of our Institute

Our lab is part of the Chair of Geoinformation Engineering at ETH Zurich, and therefore also part of the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation, which was celebrating its 100th anniversary with a large symposium on 4-5 September 2025.

We feel honored being part of this prestigious institute for 14 years. At the symposium, Peter took the chance to reflect about the history of the geoGAZElab (initially called “Mobile Eye Tracking Lab”), how it all started, and the research contributions we have made so far. Slides of Peter’s short presentation are available here.

27
Nov 23
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Eyes4ICU at LBS 2023

In the scope of the MSCA Doctoral Network Eyes4ICU, our doctoral students Lin Che and Yiwei Wang are investigating novel ways of using eye tracking for the improvement of location-based services. They presented and discussed their research at the 18th Conference on Location Based Services in Ghent, Belgium, last week.

Congrats, Lin, for receiving the best short paper award!

Work-in-progress papers (DOI assignment pending):

Che, L., Raubal, M., and Kiefer, P. (2023) Towards Personalized Pedestrian Route Recommendation Based on Implicit Visual Preference. In: Huang, H., Van de Weghe, N., and Gartner, G. (editors), Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Location Based Services, Ghent, Belgium (to appear) [PDF]
Wang, Y., Raubal, M., and Kiefer, P. (2023) Towards gaze-supported emotion-enhanced travel experience logging. In: Huang, H., Van de Weghe, N., and Gartner, G. (editors), Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Location Based Services, Ghent, Belgium (to appear) [PDF]

06
Sep 23
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“Do You Need Instructions Again? Predicting Wayfinding Instruction Demand”

In collaboration with colleagues from TU Vienna, we have published a full paper in the proceedings of this year’s GIScience conference, taking place next week in Leeds, U.K.:

The demand for instructions during wayfinding can be considered as an important indicator of the internal cognitive processes during wayfinding. In the paper, we are predicting instruction demand in a real-world wayfinding experiment with 45 participants using different environmental, user, instructional, and gaze-related features. Being able to predict instruction demand can, for instance, be beneficial for navigation systems that adapt instructions in real-time, based on their users’ behavior.

Alinaghi, N., Kwok, T. C., Kiefer, P., & Giannopoulos, I. (2023). Do You Need Instructions Again? Predicting Wayfinding Instruction Demand. In 12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2023). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik.

Download PDF

15
Feb 21
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Results of the Interdisciplinary Project 2020

As an interdisciplinary project, the three Geomatics Master students Laura Schalbetter, Tianyu Wu and Xavier Brunner have developed an indoor navigation system for Microsoft HoloLens 2. The system was implemented using ESRI CityEngine, Unity, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

Check out their video:

13
Jul 17
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Culmann Award

Dr. Ioannis Giannopoulos received the ETH Zurich Culmann Award in 2017 for an outstanding doctoral thesis “Supporting Wayfinding Through Mobile Gaze-Based Interaction”.

18
Jan 17
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Special Issue Appearing: Spatial Cognition&Computation 17 (1-2)

A double Special Issue on “Eye Tracking for Spatial Research” in Spatial Cognition&Computation, guest-edited by Peter, Ioannis, Martin, and Andrew Duchowski, has appeared [URL].

Nineteen manuscripts were submitted to an open Call for Submissions, out of which seven were finally accepted after a rigorous review process.

The Special Issue commences with an overview article, authored by the Guest Editors: “Eye tracking for spatial research: Cognition, computation, challenges” [URL, PDF].

30
Nov 16
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Article in Horizonte

The latest issue of the Horizonte magazine, published by the Swiss National Science Foundation, is reporting on our research.

Source: Horizonte 111, December 2016

German (PDF)

English (PDF)

03
Nov 16
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INNOLEC Lecture

Martin Raubal was invited for the INNOLEC Lecture at the Department of Geography of the Masaryk University Brünn, Czech Republic.

The title of his talk is: Gaze-based assistance for wayfinders in the real world (slides as PDF, all our presentations).

15
Feb 16
0

Full paper accepted at ETRA 2016

Verena Schnitzler, Ioannis Giannopoulos, Christoph Hölscher and Iva Barisic (2016). The Interplay of Pedestrian Navigation, Wayfinding Devices, and Environmental Features in Indoor Settings. In Proceedings of the 2016 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications (ETRA ’16). ACM

17
Dec 15
0

PhD graduation

Thank you all for the great teamwork over the last years and for the very cool hat you made for me!

18
Nov 15
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BSc/MSc topics for spring 2016

We offer topics for student theses on Bachelor and Master level:

Bachelor (PDF, German)

Master (PDF, English)

You may also propose your own topic related to eye tracking, wayfinding, or gaze-based interaction. Contact us for more information!

The full lists of all topics (including non-eye tracking topics) can be found on the main page of the Chair of Geoinformation Engineering.

26
May 15
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Full Paper accepted at MobileHCI 2015

Ioannis Giannopoulos, Peter Kiefer, and Martin Raubal (2015). GazeNav: Gaze-Based Pedestrian Navigation. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices & Services. ACM, New York, NY, USA.

Leading Mobile HCI researchers from all over the world meet in Copenhagen to present innovative research and gadgets. Our research group is present with 4 contributions. Read More

24
May 15
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Full paper accepted at COSIT 2015

Kiefer, P., Scheider, S., Giannopoulos, I., and Weiser, P. (2015). A wayfinding grammar based on reference system transformations. In S.I. Fabrikant, M. Raubal, M. Bertolotto, C. Davies, S. Freundschuh, and S. Bell (Eds.), Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2015), volume 9368 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 447-467. Springer International Publishing

[Download as PDF]

19
May 15
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Department Annual Report 2014

A summary of our research on “Gaze-Based Geographic Human Computer Interaction” (PDF) is included as a research highlight in the annual report 2014 of our department (D-BAUG, Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering).

10
Mar 15
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Master theses started

Two students have started their Master theses in the GeoGazeLab:

Aikaterini Tsampazi, a Master student in Geomatics, will use eye tracking to measure the visual behavior of wayfinders in a virtual environment in her Master thesis titled “Pedestrian Navigation: The use of navigation aids under time pressure in virtual urban environments”. The goal will be to investigate how pedestrian wayfinders behave under time pressure.

Yufan Miao, a Master student in Computational Science from Uppsala University, is visiting our group in spring and summer 2015. He will be working on his Master thesis on “Landmark detection for mobile eye tracking”, co-supervised by our group and the Chair of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (Prof. Schindler). The goal is to apply image processing techniques to outdoor eye tracking videos for the automatic computation of the object of regard.

24
Feb 15
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Book chapter on gaze-based interaction for GIS (German)

Kiefer, P. (2015). Blickbasierte Mensch-Computer-Interaktion mit Geoinformationssystemen. In Thomas H. Kolbe, Ralf Bill, and Andreas Donaubauer, editors, Geoinformationssysteme 2015. Wichmann, Heidelberg.

[PDF]

12
Feb 15
0

Paper accepted at CHI Workshop 2015

Ioannis Giannopoulos, Peter Kiefer, and Martin Raubal. Watch What I Am Looking At! Eye Gaze and Head-Mounted Displays. In Mobile Collocated Interactions: From Smartphones to Wearables, Workshop at CHI 2015, Seoul, Korea, 2015.

[PDF]