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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 way
by kefka 12y ago
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 12y agoI 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 12y agofocus follows gaze might be the first real hardware-fueled productivity improvement since the scrolling wheel. That's pretty cool if you ask me.
- seanp2k2 12y agoSeems 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!