We have just started a thesis project to investigate the possibility to integrate Tobii eye tracking technology with SenseGraphics H3DAPI and SenseGraphics Display solutions. Tobii, a company in Sweden, has been very successful in bringing their eye tracking products to the market, not only for assistive and research use but also in outstanding eye-tracking solutions for market research and usability studies/analysis. In just a couple of years they’ve grown from a small start-up to a company employing well over 200 people, all over the world!

The Tobii eye tracking technology has some advantages to competitors solutions; fully automatic eye tracking, very high accuracy with the ability to track nearly all people with good tolerances on head motions.

The thesis work includes hardware integration of eye tracking for use in SenseGraphics “immersive workbench” solutions. As we are using real stereo 3D in our setups, there is a great challenge to overcome the problem of 3D glasses blocking lights. Tobii is using advanced image processing of a person’s face and eyes and reflections in the eyes of infrared reference lights to estimate eye position and precise “gaze target”. The thesis project will investigate some possible solutions and hopefully we’re able to present a working prototype later this year…!?

The combination of eye tracking and use of haptics in real 3D stereo interactive environments would allow for some very interesting research possibilities in for example neuroscience. Hopefully our H3DAPI users will “soon” gain access to users gaze and eye position data for further research application development in SenseGraphics Display solutions…