Abstract
Engineering deliverables to construction craft workers have remained largely unchanged for a century. Black and white, 2D paper drawings are the primary medium by which engineering designs are communicated, but a certain level of experience is required in order for a craft worker to efficiently extract necessary information from a drawing. This work presents a novel method of visualizing and analyzing eye tracking data through the use of convex hull areas. Convex hull areas are proposed as a metric for measuring the amount of information that a participant is processing from a drawing at a given instant in time.
Eye tracking data was collected in a previous study where 20 construction craft workers were tasked with assembling a PVC pipe assembly from traditional 2D isometric pipe spool drawings. Demographic data and spatial cognition data were also collected from each participant. In the present work, craft worker spatial cognition and years of construction experience were both shown to correlate with a craft worker's average convex hull area. The authors developed software for producing animations of eye tracking data convex hull areas, but have only begun to assess the data produced from the convex hull analysis method. Average convex hull areas were analyzed in the present work, but several potential additional metrics are suggested. This study was severely limited by the small sample size of the previous study and further data collection is warranted to confirm the findings presented herein.