Since its first edition in 2021, PrEThics has become an integral part of ETRA, spearheading much-needed discussions on the social, legal, and ethical implications of eye tracking. Previous workshops have identified necessary adjustments for privacy-aware and ethical eye tracking technology.
The focus of this year’s edition is on privacy-preserving eye tracking in gaming and VR. Eye tracking is already built into the more expensive and advanced HMDs today. With further miniaturization and falling prices, it will also find its way into cheaper headset models in the near future and thus become a commonplace on the mass consumer market. Through games and related applications such as VR and the metaverse, eye tracking has the potential of deeply impacting the privacy of millions of people worldwide and must therefore be used in an ethically, legally, and socially responsible manner.
This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from
- eye tracking,
- XAI,
- (usable) privacy,
- law,
- ethics,
- human-computer interaction,
- psychology
- and other eye tracking-related research fields,
- and industry.
The workshop will comprise a combination of concise presentations and interactive components, following a format that has proven effective in previous years. The workshop is divided into four parts, each with a specific objective. First, a general introduction and a series of lightning talks will provide an overview of current and future applications of eye tracking in digital media. Second, we will zoom in on the use case of VR gaming, addressing utilisations, privacy issues, legal aspects, and ethical concerns. This is followed, third, by a hands-on workshop during which possibilities for the practical implementation of privacy-preserving eye tracking will be tested and evaluated.
The workshop consists of three phases: Phase 1 (SHOW) offers a practice-oriented introduction to eye tracking in gaming by means of a demonstrator; during phase 2 (REFLECT) participants are invited to join moderated focus group discussions; and phase 3 (SPECIFY) considers concrete requirements and practical implementations of privacy-preserving eye tracking in VR gaming. Fourth and finally, the workshop concludes with a plenary discussion on the implications of transferring social, ethical and legal aspects from basic research to everyday applications in order to define better practices.
Program (might be subject to change)
| 11:00 – 11:30 | Opening and Introduction |
| 11:30 – 12:30 | Input I: Applications and implications of eye tracking in digital media (lightning talks by invited speakers) |
| 12:30 – 13:00 | Input II: Privacy issues of eye tracking in gaming - Utilisations, privacy, legal and ethical aspects (talks + discussion) |
| 13:00 – 14:00 | Lunch break |
| 14:00 – 16:00 | SHOW: Eye tracking in practice: Showcase and “How to Read Thoughts”- tutorial on eye tracking in gaming |
| 16:00 – 16:30 | Coffee break |
| 16:30 – 17:15 | REFLECT: Focus group discussion on ethical/legal/social aspects |
| 17:15 – 17:45 | SPECIFY: Specify requirements for privacy-preserving eye tracking in gaming |
| 17:45 – 18:00 | Concluding discussion |
Organisers
Murat Karaboga - Competence Center Emerging Technologies of the Fraunhofer
ISI, Germany
Murat Karaboga is a senior researcher and has been working in
the Competence Center Emerging Technologies of the Fraunhofer
ISI since January 2014. His work focuses on policy analysis and
the analysis of governance and actor structures in the domain of
Information and Communication Technologies.
Theresa Krampe - University of Tuebingen, Germany
Theresa Krampe is a postdocoral researcher affiliated with the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tübingen with a background in media studies and a PhD in game studies. Her research focusses on media aesthetics as well as on the entanglements between digital media, culture, and technology, which she analyses from ethical and intersectional perspectives. At the University of Tübingen, she has been involved in research projects on surveillance in digital games, on fairness in GenAI, and on the role of ethics in technology development more generally.
Céline Gressel - University of Tuebingen, Germany
Céline Gressel is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on Science and Technology Studies, qualitative methods of empirical social research (in particular Grounded Theory), ethics in the sciences and humanities, and issues and implications of integrating social, ethical and legal aspects into technology development. She studied sociology, psychology and education at Tübingen University, and has been working at the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities since 2011.
Michael Raschke - Blickshift GmbH, Germany
Michael Raschke is Co-Founder and managing director of Blickshift GmbH and an expert for a visualization-based eye movement analysis. From 2009 to 2015 he worked on new methods and techniques for the analysis of perceptual and cognitive processes at the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems at the University of Stuttgart. In 2016 he founded Blickshift GmbH together with two of his former colleagues from the institute to transfer research results in eye tracking analysis into commercial products.
Aljoscha Schörnig - University of Kassel, Germany
Aljoscha Schörnig is a fully qualified lawyer and research assistant in the project group for constitutionally compatible technology design (provet) at the Scientific Center for Information Technology Design (ITeG) at the University of Kassel. His research focuses on IT and data protection law.
Christian Geminn - University of Kassel, Germany
Christian Geminn is a private lecturer for Public Law and Law of the Digital Society at the University of Kassel as well as senior researcher at the Research Center for Information System Design (ITeG) in Kassel. He is also active as a consultant for ministries, non-profit organizations as well as large and small companies and principal investigator in a number of research projects. His doctorate was awarded for work in the field of legally com- patible technology design. His habilitation examined the implications of digitization for selected fundamental rights and their concretizations in sub-constitutional law – especially in data protection law as a central regulatory matter regarding digitization – as well as conversely the controllability of digitization through fundamental rights and the legal system that they shape. Overall, his research interests focus on fundamental rights, comparative law, data protection and governance as well as technology law.
Andreas Bulling - University of Stuttgart, Germany
Andreas Bulling is Full Professor of Human-Computer Interaction
and Cognitive Systems at the University of Stuttgart. His research interests are in novel computational
methods and systems to sense, model, and analyze everyday non-verbal
human behavior, specifically gaze. He was one of the organisers and
panelist of the privacy in eye tracking panel at ACM ETRA 2019. He
received his PhD in Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
from ETH Zurich and his MSc in Computer Science from the Karlsruhe
Institute of Technology.