Eye-Tracking Advancements in Architecture: A Review of Recent Studies

This Scoping Review (SR) synthesizes advances in architectural eye-tracking (ET) research published between 2010 and 2024. Drawing on 75 peer-reviewed studies that met clear inclusion criteria, it monitors the field’s rapid expansion, from only 20 experiments before 2018 to more than 45 new investigations in the next three years, while situating these developments within the longer historical evolution of ET hardware and analytical paradigms. The review maps thirteen recurrent application areas, with the strongest focus on design evaluation, wayfinding and spatial navigation, end-user experience, and architectural education. Across these domains, ET reliably reveals where occupants focus, for how long, and in what sequence, providing objective evidence that complements the intuition of the designers and conventional post-occupancy surveys. Experts and novices display distinct gaze signatures; for example, architects spend longer fixations on contextual and structural cues, whereas lay users dwell on decorative details, highlighting pedagogical opportunities. Despite these benefits, persistent challenges include data loss in dynamic or outdoor settings, calibration drift, single-user hardware constraints, and the need to triangulate gaze metrics with cognitive or affective measures. Future research directions emphasize integrating ET with virtual or augmented reality (VR) (AR) to validate designs interactively, improving mobile tracking accuracy, and establishing shared datasets to enable replication and meta-analysis. Overall, the study demonstrates that ET is maturing into an indispensable, evidence-based lens for creating more intuitive, legible, and human-centered architecture.