What Can Eye Gaze Teach Us About Real-World Cycling? Insights From the Oxford RobotCycle Project
For urban planners and cyclist safety researchers, it provides a novel method to measure subconscious perceived danger in real-world cycling, though the findings are specific to Oxford and incremental in nature.
This paper uses wearable eye tracking to study perceived safety of cycling in Oxford, finding that eye gaze patterns differ significantly between lane types, intersections, and events (e.g., passes, pedestrians), indicating different cognitive challenges and stress levels.
Although much is known about the physical danger of cycling situations, less is understood about the perceived danger of cycling. Furthermore, perception of danger may be filtered at a subconscious level and therefore difficult for one to self-report. To this end, these subconscious perceptions can be revealed through physiological metrics such as eye gaze. This paper explores the perceived safety of cycling in Oxford, United Kingdom and explores the ability of wearable eye tracking glasses to produce insights about the differences in perception under different environments and events. This paper finds that eye gaze patterns change between using bike lanes, car lanes and shared bus lanes, representing different cognitive challenges of each lane type. This paper presents that different intersections have significantly different eye gaze patterns which may have implications for cyclist stress. Finally, eye gaze patterns differ in the presence of events such as passes and pedestrians in the road compared to when cycling with no events. This paper draws conclusions on the benefits and limitations of using wearable eye trackers to estimate stress and cyclist workload.