Specifically: eye tracking to test the use of thumbnails in search results.  Though the blog report is fairly brief, they did come to specific conclusion.

Our studies showed that the thumbnails did not strongly affect the order of scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants to find the result they wanted.

There is a real time eye tracking video and some heat map images in the article too.

Go read the original and let us know what you think in the comments.

– Story from Official Google Blog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

I’d like to start a thread on here about how we could approach the usability issues of VR displays like this, and really about how as we move forward what sort of challenges people see coming, and how they might be solved.

For a start, the reason I’m so keen on this idea, is that having had back pain due to sitting in a chair for prolonged periods, I can see a need for an “Active Interface” where I can spend my day moving about to interact with my computer.

I think that one of the interesting problems that the VR displays will pose, apart from the ability to link a point on the screen/in the space in front of you, with your finger/wiimote is that Information Architecture will become even more massively important. However, I think that by Benchmarking some real world solutions – like supermarkets, some of those problems will already have been solved.

Information Architecture