For teachers & students · Optional
An optional extra on top of the camera signal. It estimates, moment by moment, whether the reader was facing the screen with their eyes open during active reading time. There's no setup, and everything about the face and eyes is worked out on the device.
Whether the head is turned towards the screen, the eyes are open, and the eyes aren't turned far to one side. Blinks and quick glances are ignored.
Track words or lines, or show reading, attention or understanding. Someone facing the screen may not be looking at the text.
Gaze observation needs the camera signal to be on first, and is turned on separately. It may not be switched on for every school yet.
The reading activity report includes a Gaze observations section. Its categories add up to the student's active time:
| Category | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Facing the screen, eyes open | Head turned towards the screen, relative to the student's usual position, with eyes open. |
| Not facing the screen, incl. no face in view | Head turned away, eyes closed, or eyes turned well to one side, for about a second or more. Also includes time when the camera found no face in view, for example after the student left their seat. |
| Uncertain | The camera couldn't give a clear result: more than one face in view, poor lighting, a covered lens, or stale camera frames. Not evidence of looking away. |
| Not sampled | Gaze observations were off. |
Estimate available is the share of gaze-enabled time with a facing or not-facing result. It describes availability, not accuracy or an attention score. Activity saved by earlier versions used a different method and shares the same columns.
No face in view is counted as not facing only once the camera has confirmed it for about three seconds, so the first moments after someone moves away still show as uncertain. A student reading with their face out of shot, such as a phone held very low, also counts as not facing. The Camera observations section shows how much time had no face in view, so you can tell looking away from leaving the camera's view.
Lighting, glasses, movement and device position all affect results, and accuracy hasn't yet been measured on real devices. Use these observations alongside the student's response and discussion, never as the only basis for a grade or a claim that a student didn't read.
Face and eye data never leave the device.
Head angles, eye measurements and the learned position stay in the browser's memory and are cleared when gaze is turned off or the page closes. Only the category (facing, not facing or uncertain) is saved with the reading activity. No images, video or eye positions are uploaded.
A separate face-landmark model downloads from Google when gaze is first enabled.
| You see | What to try |
|---|---|
| Eye signal unavailable | Choose Retry eye detector, or keep reading without it. |
| Learning your usual position | Normal for the first few seconds. Keep reading. |
| Uncertain for a long time | Light your face from the front, keep only one person in view, and place the camera close to the screen. |
| Not facing while reading | Check for glare on glasses, that the camera isn't far off to one side, and that your whole face is in the camera's view. |
A further layer is being tested. While the reader faces the screen, it looks for the eye-movement pattern of reading: moving along a line, then sweeping back to the start of the next. It's off in reports until it has been checked on real devices.