Using Eye Tracking Technology to Evaluate New Chinese Furniture Material Design.

With the rapid economic growth in China, Chinese style furniture has revived quietly and "new Chinese furniture" that accords with the demand of the time has also been generated. Not only it is an inheritance of Chinese long-standing history and culture, but also it complies with the international trend. Material is an important design element in new Chinese furniture. With our scientific and technological progress, the methods and means of design have been continuously improving and updating, and the modes of design appraisal have been emerging endlessly. However, few research is on the design appraisal of materials used in new Chinese furniture. Eye-tracking technology takes users' eye movement as the basis of measurement and appraisal, which is relatively more suitable for the inspection of the visibility, characteristic meaning and interface layout of exterior elements. Thus, it can provide product development with objective, comparable and quantitative standards of measurement. In this research, eye-tracking technology and the method of subjective assessment are combined and desktops in new Chinese furniture are taken as an example. The eye movement features and subjective assessment results in undergraduate respondents' preference assessment of four commonly used materials for desktops (bamboo, wood, glass and metal) are recorded. It is found out through analysis and comparison that there are significance differences between professional and non-professional respondents' assessment of the materials. In the assessment of materials, as the level of subjective assessment rises, the respondents clap their eyes on the materials at a longer time more frequently, and their pupil diameter becomes larger. However, it has nothing to do with the duration of continued watching. Therefore, the time and duration of watching, and pupil diameter can be taken as effective indexes in eye movement assessment of materials of new Chinese furniture.