The 1st Workshop on Eye Tracking Techniques, Applications and Challenges (ETTAC 2020) was organized in conjunction with ICPR 2020, the 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Milan, Italy, January 10-15, 2021. Both the conference and the workshop, initially planned for September 2020 and then postponed to January 2021, took place in virtual form.

Eye tracking technology is becoming more and more widespread nowadays, also thanks to the recent availability of cheap commercial devices. At the same time, novel techniques are constantly pursued to improve the precision of gaze detection, and new ways to fully exploit the potential of eye data are continuously explored. Whatever the considered use context, be it Human-Computer Interaction, user behavior understanding, biometrics, or others, pattern recognition often plays a relevant role.

The purpose of the ETTAC workshop was to present recent eye tracking research that directly or indirectly exploits any form of pattern recognition. The event’s scope included (but was not limited to) the following topics:

• Gaze detection techniques and devices
• Gaze-based human-computer interaction (assistive technologies, hybrid interfaces, etc.)
• Eye tracking for usability inspection
• Eye tracking in VR/AR applications
• User behavior understanding from eye data
• Eye movement analysis for biometrics, security and privacy
• Eye tracking in medicine and health care
• Visualization of gaze data

Accepted manuscripts are included in the ICPR 2020 Workshop Proceedings Springer volume. Moreover, the authors of selected high-quality papers were invited to submit extended versions of their works to a special issue in Sensors (IF 3.275).