Eye tracking study and analysis for a thrilling game like cricket. The idea itself sounds captivating. In cricket, a batsman watches a bowler’s ball coming towards him with an alarming speed bouncing off the ground having uneven hardness and within a fraction of a second, he has to judge the exact track and movement of the ball and when the ball will reach up to him, then decide his action quickly. Here, the eye tracking analysis can show the study of fixations of the batsman at various points through which the ball travels to him.
In an unpredictable game like cricket, looking at the right place and at the right time becomes very important. In such a case, the batsman has to maintain a perfect eye contact with the ball and the timing when it will hit him. In the following situation, Tobii Pro glasses can be used to examine the eye movements of cricket batsman and conclude that actually the batsman do not watch the ball continuously. They plan a definite eye movement strategy to view the ball coming towards him at vital movements. Eyes are the most important body part through which fastest movement can be viewed and understood. The eye movements made by a person or a player represent the first and the last step in seeing. Later, these eye movements stabilize images that get transmitted to our brain and then the brain gives responses which is our representation of the world, we are watching. So, we now, understand a point that eye movements are useful to research because the way and the point to which we move our eyes provide information on how the brain makes decisions. But, this thing may not be true in case of game like cricket, because by the time the player decides to look at the ball, it will have already changed the track. For example, a cricket ball is bowled at an average speed of 70 miles per hour. So when a player decides to watch it, the speed of the ball will have travelled more than 3 quarters the length of the pitch.
To understand the concept more precisely, lets understand the below example . In 2001, an experiment was conducted at University of Sussex. They conducted the analysis on different batsman, with different skill sets and measured their eye movements while firing cricket balls at them. The observation was the best batsman was ahead 1/5th of a second in anticipating the ball’s movement at the bounce point. It was found that the batsman were able to synchronize their head movements with the track of the ball more accurately. When the researchers looked at the eye and head movements of the batsmen, they found that there was no proper synchronization between their head movements and the movement of the ball.
So the eye tracker glasses from Tobii pro can prove to be useful for a batsman to estimate when the ball will reach to him and at what height. Here, the study of eye movements staring at the ball and the speed with which the actual action is made by the batsman can be recorded successfully with the help of tobii pro glasses.