Yesterday, 23rd November, we reached the impressive amount of 10.000 downloads of the binaries of our open-source gaze tracker from SourceForge. This happens approximately one and a half years since we made our first release, back in April 2009. Furthermore, the trend shows an increase of downloads every month, which encourages us to continue the development of the software to add new features and make it as robust as possible.

As always, we welcome collaboration from everyone interested in giving back something to the community. This can take the form of an economic donation via PayPal so we can buy and test new hardware; helping in the  development of the software and/or gaze-based applications; and writing guides explaining a custom setup in our forum.

We are very happy that more and more people have access to a traditionally expensive technology, and hope that the spread of the open-source eye tracker will lead to new applications and human-computer interaction paradigms in the near future. We encourage you to be a part of it.

Pushing the limits, +500Hz remote monocular tracking at 60cm. Using aggressive settings demonstrate the capabilities of the GT2 tracking engine. A more practical configuration would be 300Hz which gives a little more room to move.

HD video available (click 360p and select 720p)

The latest version now includes performance counters that keeps track on processor load, memory usage and tracking speed. If the processor or memory utilization is above 50% the numbers will turn red. If the actual tracking speed is less than 50% of the camera capture rate the fps number turns red. Simple and intuitive.

Using the new instant accuracy reporting function that Javier implemented I have incorporated it to give direct feedback upon completed calibration. While it is an estimate based on default distances it provides an instant accuracy number that I’ve never seen in any of the commercial offerings. Further on we’ll have the option to configure the variables so values are calculated to the individual configuration (for example 70 cm distance instead of 60cm default).

While the 0.75 degrees of accuracy reported by Javier is impressive, especially at the low price point, I have obtained numbers at 0.3-0.6 while doing remote binocular tracking at 120-150Hz. The difference being the camera and optics used which raises the cost to around $450, still affordable in my opinion.

Binocular tracking @ 150Hz, accuracy estimated to 0.3 degrees of visual angle of a 24″ at 60cm.

High speed remote tracking relies on switching between the full image to detect the eyes and then moving to a smaller region of interest, this allows a partial sensor readout on more advanced cameras which increases the speed dramatically. I have successfully been tracking monocular (one eye) at 350Hz!