Josh Wise competed in 156 races over eight years in NASCAR’s Cup Series. Now he works as an athletic trainer for Chip Ganassi Racing, and he has turned to technology to answer questions he never could in the driving seat. Wise is using Tobii eye-tracking devices to learn exactly where his drivers are visually focused during training sessions.
“I really wasn’t too sure where I was looking as a driver,” Wise said. “As a trainer, being able to provide that tool for the drivers I work with and really breakdown that information and talk about how it could be affecting their craft is really cool. I wish I had it as a driver.”
Shortly after retiring from driving in 2017, Wise joined CGR as an athletic trainer and driver performance manager. “If I only knew where they were looking,” Wise recalls saying in a meeting with other CGS staff about the team’s drivers. That prompted Wise to look into eye tracking technology, which led to a dialogue with Tobii, a Swedish company that has manufactured and sold eye-tracking technology since 2001. For the past year and a half, Chip Ganassi drivers have worn Tobii Pro Glasses 2 during training sessions. Those glasses have provided both the team’s drivers and trainers with valuable insight regarding a driver’s cognitive processes.
The devices are also worn by pit crew members during training so coaches can better analyze their performance and provide feedback. Even if eye-tracking technology helps a pit crew change a tire a fraction of a second faster, that could make the difference between winning and losing a race.
“For me, it creates opportunity to understand the behavioral aspects of what guys are doing when they’re driving,” Wise said. “What types of strategies they’re using with their vision and how that’s affecting the decisions they’re making. Everything from how fast they could drive on a given racetrack to the decisions they make in traffic around other cars.”
NASCAR rules do not permit accessory devices such as Tobii’s eye-tracking glasses to be worn during live events. The most common Tobii eye-tracking device used by sports teams is the Pro Glasses 2, which comes with two micro-cameras for each eye placed inside the frame of the glasses. Facing inward, each camera takes 100 images per second. A full HD wide angle camera sits on the front-center of the glasses pointing out toward the field of play so that everything an athlete sees is being recorded.
Two separate software programs called Tobii Pro Lab and Tobii Pro Glasses Controller allow observers to collect information, run analysis on that data, and view the video footage recorded by the glasses in real-time. Using a built-in Wi-Fi system, the footage can be transmitted to a nearby tablet or computer. While Wise is able to view footage in real time, the real impact of Tobii’s eye tracking technology comes after a training session, when Wise will sit down with his drivers to discuss their decision making on a racetrack and talk about certain tendencies drivers may have that previously went unnoticed.
Tobii’s eye-tracking devices are also worn by goalies in a Swedish ice hockey league as well as competitive gamers in ELEAGUE, an esports organization owned by Turner Sports. Mike Bartels, the Senior Research Director at Tobii, said the acceptance of eye tracking technology has helped make communication between athletes and coaches more fluid and concise than ever before. Bartels has worked in the eye-tracking industry for 12 years, and has been at Tobii for the last six.
“You’re probably never going to be able to have Steph Curry fully explain and elaborate what he’s doing visually when he’s coming down the court with the ball,” Bartels said. “But if you’re able to review the footage that shows exactly where he’s looking during this process and learn from his visual process, we often find that athletes learn things about their process that they weren’t aware of and weren’t able to explain.”
Bartels refers to his first years in the industry as the “dark ages,” given most devices were clunky and cumbersome compared to today. “If you wanted to track somebody doing a natural task, you were putting a heavy helmet on them with two huge cameras right below their eyes, and a giant cable connecting to a desktop computer that you would push around in a shopping cart to a battery in order to track someone doing a real live task,” he said.
The next step for Tobii according to Bartels will be adding the ability to consume real-time eye-tracking footage and data through a smartphone in addition to a tablet or computer. For the Chip Ganassi Racing team, Wise is hopeful NASCAR rules will eventually allow for the devices to be worn in races.
“There’s definitely some challenges with live environment data,” Wise said. “We have to be careful not to put too much in stake for what we see in training or in a controlled environment versus what an athlete’s doing in a competitive environment. So that’s where I think some really valuable information can continue to come for, is more live environment kind of monitoring.”