
Tobii and SteelSeries Release Consumer Eye Tracker - pjf
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/consumer-electronics/gadgets/why-i-love-ces-tobii-and-steelseries-release-consumer-eye-tracker
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kefka
At my workplace, we obtained a Tobii Rex for dev and investigation.

After both my supervisor and I took a good long crack at it, we could think of
very few ways it could be used. Of course, eye tracking has traditionally been
used in the medical disabled industry, for good reason.

But when it comes to "What can it be used for in a university setting", we
came up with a blank.

rdw is correct about the eyeX, and it also applies to the Rex: the operational
area is around 2 foot cube. If you move your eyes out of that, the driver/SDK
throws a tantrum and desyncs your gaze. This also means having an interactive
demo is nigh impossible, as the gaze tracker has to be within a small area of
the head/eyes.

And you better not blink, as it cannot track an eye. It has to have both eyes
available. Im not entirely sure why they didn't implement tracking with each
eye independently, but that's what they did.

Calibration is also a pain. You have to calibrate the device stick to the
monitor (not hard), and then you have to follow your gaze around the screen to
the little dots for calibration. With this calibration, it changed
significantly from morning to evening to the point I had to be a different
user.

I also found their SDK and accompanying demo software to be completely
lackluster. Every demo required keyboard button presses. Not only that, but
their program in the control panel had no hands-free options; just mostly
hands free. There was no completely hands-free app to control parts or the
whole computer. This is one of the reasons we thought this might be
interesting.

The other issue is of accuracy: what the hardware is doing is sending out tons
of 'gaze detection events' that raytrace where the device thinks you're
looking. When you're in the calibration, you can see this by the dozens of
dots around the 'focus dot'. These are the ray-traces that attempt to figure
out your gaze. And it's not great. Some dots in the middle (think + on the
screen) were fine. But the dots on the 4 corners of the screen would routinely
come in as scattered clouds that would "kind of, not really" synchronize. And
we'd have to go back through the calibration because accuracy really stunk.

In the end, our dept gave our Tobii Rex to the Disability office of the
Chancellor. We both hoped they could tease out better performance and
usability than we could.

~~~
mtrimpe
I had a somewhat similar experience with EyeTribe, their main competitor
(bigger area, lower accuracy, not sure about single eye tracking.)

One use-case I _did_ see however was 'focus follows gaze' which seams at least
could be fairly valuable. If I wasn't on OS X (where the windowing system
doesn't allow for that) I'd love to have given that a try...

~~~
tormeh
focus follows gaze might be the first real hardware-fueled productivity
improvement since the scrolling wheel. That's pretty cool if you ask me.

~~~
seanp2k2
Seems like they could do this by just adding a second iSight to the top of
MacBooks. That's a much more appealing feature than a touchscreen for a laptop
for me!

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rdw
I have an EyeX. The eye tracking is very effective -- spookily so. Imprecise
but low-latency, which is the right tradeoff to make. It can be faster than
mousing, if the UI is set up just right.

The main limitations that keep me from using it:

\- Mac is not supported.

\- Very small active area. You basically have to keep your head within about a
2x2 foot cube. You can't lean back, on an armrest, or even slump.

~~~
listic
What is the difference between EyeX and 'SteelSeries Sentry Gaming Eye
Tracker' described in an article?

Can you enlarge your active area by moving the monitor further away from your
head?

I guess Linux is not supported, too?

~~~
unwind
For Linux they seem to be recommending the "Tobii REX" at a comfortable $795.
Ouch. :(

~~~
kefka
And it's not even that good. We had a Rex. We gave it away. Read my post
above. It gives better detail of our trials and our result.

~~~
listic
ok, so now there's an EyeX, Rex and this newest 'SteelSeries Sentry Gaming Eye
Tracker'. What's the difference? What's the point in releasing this newer
thingy which is more expensive than EyeX, which I now see was available for
arounf a year?

~~~
kefka
It appears they added an extra IR eye scanner module, increasing accuracy. And
they're focusing on 'sell to money-is-water gamers'.

I'd wait. The zone of gaze tracking is still too small, and it's still
hardware in need of a killer app.

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ersii
Let me just say that Tobii seems like a pretty awesome company. They're a
Swedish start-up (maybe they're past that now) that has, if I recall correctly
now released their first consumer product. Previously they were mostly into
doing usability studies and such in pretty closed environments (which is
probably why their other equipment and dev-kits are so heavily priced).

I've had the chance to talk to a few Tobii-engineers in Stockholm at a few
general gatherings and like I previously said, Tobii seems to be a pretty
interesting company.

I've heard that Tobii Technologies is going to launch an Initial Public
Offering on the NASDAQ OMX Stockholm Stock Exchange sometime under 2015,
although official time plans are not available.

Investor AB owns about 20% and Intel owns about 10% of Tobii Technologies.

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pjf
Tobii made the EyeX Dev Kit available for 95 USD at
[http://www.tobii.com/en/eye-experience/buy/](http://www.tobii.com/en/eye-
experience/buy/)

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Terr_
Forget just using it to control games, cheap/fast/accurate gaze-tracking has
huge potential when it comes to passive analysis:

1\. Performance! You only need to render high-quality pixels in the places
where the user is (or will) look. Lower-quality content can be put into their
peripheral vision and they won't notice.

2\. Depth-of-field effects will actually be good instead of a pain in the ass,
because the "focal distance" is more likely to be whatever the user is
actually looking at. (Not perfect, though: Is the user looking at the
semitransparent steam-puffs 5m away or the wall 100m behind?)

3\. High dynamic range can behave and adjust appropriately since the system
knows whether you're gazing into a light or dark area. Current systems either
take the entire scene into account (bad) or weigh things towards the crosshair
(a bit better) which might not be where the user is actually trying to look.

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ccozan
This technology could be really useful in a car. Tracking eyes either could
make driving more safe by detecting if I am really aware and watching the
traffic or traffic signs ( "you have overlooked the 30kmh sign") or maybe more
informative, and combined with a HUD to give me information about the objects
I am looking at ( fun facts about the car in front of me, or what PoI /
Mountain I am looking at, etc )

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n1c
I wonder if 'fixations per minute' will become the new APM.

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emsy
If the precision is sufficient, it could be used to counter RSI. Also, I think
for gaming it could serve as a third, passive input element.

~~~
mtrimpe
That's what I gave it a try for and as I mentioned in my other comment the
only thing it's accuracy would work for at the moment is focus-follows-gaze.

It could work very well when combined with speech recognition and broad
'focus-targets,' but that will/would require a lot of changes to existing
software.

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im2w1l
This is super cool technology. However I worry how advertisers may use this.

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innguest
Advertisers will use this to try and sell you more targeted products, so their
advertising costs go down and they can be profitable longer, improve their
products, sell more, etc.

You should worry about how governments will use this data.

