Do Museum Visitors See what Educators Want Them to See?

Digital museum guides - often together with eye trackers as innovative gadgets for intuitive interaction - provide attractive new ways for museums to communicate information to visitors and analyze their behaviour. In this paper, we investigate an approach to understand the gaze bedhaviour of persons viewing paintings in a museum. We present a method that can detect focussed areas (AOF) by analysing the fixation duration for the pixels of a painting. We can provide evidence that the viewing behaviour of laymen in a museum differs from what an expert expects according to the art historic relevance of certain regions of interest (ROI) in a painting. Consequently, museum educators have to apply intelligent assistance strategies that allow visitors to fully appreciate exhibits during their visit a of museum.