On its seventh occasion, it is our pleasure to bring ETRA 2012 to Santa Barbara, CA. The series of ETRA symposiums has become the leading international conference in eye tracking technology and its applications, bringing together people from a wide range of backgrounds. Authors have been encouraged to submit papers on topics such as advances in eye tracking hardware and software, eye movement data analysis, visual attention, and eye movement control.
ETRA 2012's special theme has been Mobile Eye Tracking. Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers are becoming increasingly powerful. Embedding the capability to track eye movements and support gaze-based applications in these devices raises new challenges and opportunities for many aspects of eye tracking research. These proceedings contain several papers that address these problems.
As in previous years, ETRA 2012 has had two kinds of submissions: Long Papers (8 pages), and Short Papers (4 pages). Authors were requested to send an abstract in advance, and submit their papers in blind-format. For the second consecutive occasion, ETRA has received more submissions than for any of the previous symposia, with 53 long and 101 short papers being submitted. These proceedings contain the 18 long and 22 short papers that were accepted for oral presentations, and the 43 short papers accepted as posters. These papers were selected after a rigorous and impartial double-blind review process, where each original submission was reviewed by at least 3 reviewers, followed by careful examination from one of our 7 Area Chairs. Each Area Chair wrote a meta-review for the papers within their area of expertise, and the final selection was made by the Program Chairs and Area Chairs, on the basis of the reviews and the meta-reviews.