Stars in their eyes: what eye-tracking reveals about multimedia perceptual quality

Perceptual multimedia quality is of paramount importance to the continued take-up and proliferation of multimedia applications; users will not use and pay for applications if they are perceived to be of low quality. While traditionally distributed multimedia quality has been characterized by quality-of-service (QoS) parameters, these neglect the user perspective of the issue of quality. In order to redress this shortcoming, we characterize the user multimedia perspective using the quality-of-perception (QoP) metric, which encompasses not only a user's satisfaction with the quality of a multimedia presentation, but also his/her ability to analyze, synthesize, and assimilate informational content of multimedia. In recognition of the fact that monitoring eye movements offers insights into visual perception, as well as the associated attention mechanisms and cognitive processes, this paper reports on the results of a study investigating the impact of differing multimedia presentation frame rates on user QoP and eye path data. Our results show that provision of higher frame rates, usually assumed to provide better multimedia presentation quality, do not significantly impact upon the median coordinate value of eye path data. Moreover, higher frame rates do not significantly increase the level of participant information assimilation, although they do significantly improve overall user enjoyment and quality perception of the multimedia content being shown.