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Fatigue as an issue has been noted in numerous eye-tracking studies. Here similarly fatigue was a problem for some of the participants, with only four of the 6 participants feeling comfortable carrying out all parts of the study.

In this case, it is likely that the choice of parametric output contributed further to the fatigue, as the output in the tasks was variously reported as being ‘trippy’ and ‘intense’ and as consisting of “too much input”. Subjects expressed that some of the fatigue could have come from the cognitive load of trying to work out what the animation was doing. One subject reported for instance that “I knew it was changing, but I couldn’t actually see it change, I was trying to work it out”. Some subjects reported perceiving a shifting ‘blur’ in the peripheral vision (as the artefacts changed in parameter value), and that this contributed to their confusion. Most subjects found that the search tasks were less tiring than the passive observation.

After the experiment, the subjects were debriefed, and only then was it revealed how their gaze was controlling the animation. They were then told how to use their gaze to consciously make the patterns at one area of the screen to spread to the rest, which all subjects could do easily.

4.4 Discussion and Further Work

In summary, the following observations were made over the course of the experiments:

• Observation 1: Overall gaze patterns favoured the centre of the screen, followed by the

upper corners, with a possible gender bias of right-hand preference in males.

• Observation 2: Non-volitional, passive observation gaze is attracted to more intricate pat-

terns, as a consequence of greater circle intersection due to the larger circle size.

• Observation 3: Volitional, searching gaze can guide the system across small parametric

distances.

• Observation 4: Fatigue is a significant issue.

4.4.1 Success

Could Keyebernates be considered a ‘success’? Was it successful in mapping out the parameter- space of the generative process with respect to cross-user, objective aesthetic desirability? A metric for success was defined in section 1.2.1. It consists of two criteria: C1 - correlation

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between parameter choices and aesthetic value of the output, and C2 - sufficient volume of data points and significant trends.

C1

With regards to observation 2, care must be taken before attributing greater aesthetic value to the patterns with larger circles, or claiming that passive observation of Keyebernates necessarily engenders a navigation towards parameters yielding objects of greater aesthetic worth. Certainly, when comparing the starting patterns of experiment 1 with the finishing patterns (as can be seen by looking at the top and bottom of fig. 4.14 and fig. 4.15), it is easy to see that the finishing patterns are certainly more intricate. As the circles increase in size, they overlap more, yielding more complex patterns.

Perhaps it is true that gaze is attracted to the more aesthetically pleasing objects, as some of the research surveyed in section 4.1.1 suggests, but the results of experiment 1 are unable to verify this. Keyebernates only displays a small range of the generative artefacts at any one time, and never are instances of the artefact that are far away in parameter space compared against each other on screen.

It is clear that for all subjects, passive gaze pulled the system towards larger circles and thus more intricate patterns. However that does not mean that patterns with larger circles are more beautiful, only that they are, generally, more ‘eye-catching’ than patterns in neighbouring areas of parameter space. This study was carried out in a lab setting; the environmental conditions were controlled, and the screen, its settings, as well as the configuration of the eye-tracking system was identical for all participants. There is in a sense the inverse problem to the issues of medium- specificity in the other experiments. In the other studies, data collection through crowdsourcing necessitates a lack of control over the presentation conditions for each individual. Whereas in this study, the presentation conditions are the same for each individual.

It is difficult to know if the results of this study would translate to different viewing condi- tions. Would the gaze still be drawn to larger and larger circles if the display were larger? What about if it were brighter? Or darker? What if the colours were inverted, and the background was white and the circles black? And indeed what if the work was presented in an entirely different context, and rather than being in a lab setting, was presented in an art gallery? It is not possible to answer these questions currently, however they must be kept in mind when considering the re-

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sults gathered: the results of these analysis, can only really be considered valid for the particular setup of this lab-based experiment.

It has not been possible to attribute this attraction to the larger circles to aesthetic preference, as such it cannot be said that this experiment could meet the criteria C1.

C2

The second criteria – sufficient volume of data points and significant trends– was also not met. There were two main difficulties: the issue of fatigue made it such that participants were not able to interface with Keyebernates for long durations, and the inherent slowness of the navigation through parameter space that Keyebernates engenders. These two factors made it such that only a small portion of the parameter space could be explored by the participants.

A fundamental limit of Keyebernates is that it only allows one area of parameter space could be explored at a time. If this area is near a local maximum of gaze attraction, then it becomes difficult to escape this local maximum. The gathered data did not indicate that such a peak had necessarily been reached, as the navigations did not seem to have stabilised. However the exploration is very much local to one area of parameter space, and to be able to get a sense of the geography of the fitness landscape of the generative process, there would need to be a mechanism for exploring disparate areas of parameter space.

One way of achieving this is to use Keyebernates to periodically jump to a completely dif- ferent area of the parameter space, rather than have the participants start in one place and just navigate the area nearby. Blinks can be detected in real time with eye-tracking technology. For instance every 20th blink, Keyebernates could jump to random point in parameter space, and let the navigation begin from there. This would allow for disparate parts of the parameter space to be mapped out. The issues of slowness of navigation and fatigue would still need to be overcome, however this could make it possible to identify families within the parameter space that are most attractive to gaze.

However Keyebernates in its current form, as it failed to meet both C1 and C2, was not successful in uncovering the underlying landscape linking objective aesthetic desirability to the parameter-space of the generative process.

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