[Reader-list] Reading your mouse movements
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at mnet.fr
Tue Sep 11 19:37:15 IST 2001
BBC News Online
Monday, 10 September, 2001, 07:33 GMT 08:33 UK
Reading your mouse movements
Some mouse movements are common to all
By BBC News Online's Alfred Hermida
A website that can read your body language and know what you want
before you have even clicked on anything may sound like science
fiction.
But this is what researchers in the US are working on.
A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston,
US, say they have developed a way to record mouse movements on a page
and learn how people behave when they are on the internet.
They found that certain movements of the mouse are common, allowing
them to predict how someone uses the web.
This sort of information would be invaluable to content providers who
are looking for ways of increasing the effectiveness of their
websites.
"Just by looking at the way the mouse moves, I can tell whether you
are reading a web page," says Ted Selker, an MIT professor focusing
on context-aware computing.
"I can tell because when you read a webpage, you do one of a couple
of things. You either shovel the mouse off to the right so that it is
out of the way, or you will walk down the page with your mouse," he
told the BBC's Go Digital programme.
Follow the Cheese
The system developed by the team at MIT is called Cheese, since they
are following the mouse, like a mouse follows cheese.
This is incredible. Can you imagine if I can actually tell that you
wanted to press a link but didn't
Ted Selker, MIT It provides the means to find out exactly how people
navigate a webpage.
The researchers say that if you could analyse in real time how
someone goes through a website, the content and navigation could be
adapted to create a more personal experience.
"This is incredible," says Mr Selker. "Can you imagine if I can
actually tell that you wanted to press a link but didn't.
"And 75% of the time, I can tell that you were looking at a website
but you didn't click to buy a vacation but were thinking of taking a
vacation, while doing your travel plans."
"I can change the way the travel site prepares material for you based
on what intentions and interests you've demonstrated through your
actions that aren't even recorded in the links you followed."
Current technology
The system developed at MIT works by including mouse movement data
automatically with embedded scripting. The information is analysed
and stored on a server.
This collection technique is implemented using current technology and
does not require any additional software on the user's browser.
For their study, the researchers took a group of 17 people familiar
with computers and web browsing, but from diverse backgrounds.
They recorded the mouse activity as people performed a list of tasks
common in web browsing, such as ordering a CD.
The data was evaluated by redrawing the mouse movements on each page
for each user and then visually comparing the patterns on mouse
behaviour.
Predicting choice
In one case, people were asked to buy a CD or DVD of their choice.
We're working very hard to make those kind of natural simple
communications that people make with their body through computer
interfaces
Ted Selker, MIT By studying the mouse movements, the researchers were
able to predict what their second choice would have been.
This was done by determining the link on which they hesitated longest
before clicking their first choice.
Some people occasionally moved the mouse straight to the link of
interest without hesitation. The MIT team believe this behaviour
shows that a user has visited the page before and is familiar with
its layout.
"People are extremely good at remembering graphic design," says Ted Selker.
"So when you act like you know where you are going on a place where
you have no reason to know, then we know you have been there before."
Computer scenarios
The researchers now plan to put together a website with content that
would change according to mouse behaviour.
The research by the team at MIT is part of their efforts to create a
world where desires and intentions are enough to get computers to act
on our behalf.
They aim to do this by developing environments that use sensors and
artificial intelligence to create so-called "virtual sensors" -
adaptive models of users to create keyboardless computer scenarios.
"We're working very hard to make those kind of natural simple
communications that people make with their body through computer
interfaces so that people spend less time and effort trying to
laboriously remember what command to type," says Mr Selker.
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