Introducing The Eye Tribe Tracker

It's with great pride I today introduce the Eye Tribe Tracker. It's the worlds smallest remote tracker, the first to use USB3.0 and the only one below $100. It's not targeting the research community, instead it aims for new grounds being developers of next-gen gaze interaction applications. I will let the academic crowd determine if it meets their requirements. I'm too biased to claim that it's better than this or that. The only way to properly evaluate eye trackers is through standardized evaluation carried out by independent parties.


On a personal level today marks an important milestone. I built my first gaze interaction software back in 2008, titled Neovisus, as the outcome of my MSc. at Lund University. During this work I realized that gaze interaction could be a natural interaction element, not just for a specific user group but for everyone. At the time eye trackers were unfortunately really hard to come by, the one I used costs $25,000 (and still does). Javier San Agustin and myself  attempted to fix this during our R&D of the ITU GazeTracker, an open source eye tracker software. In many ways we succeeded, but it lacked critical features; you had to order components to assembly your own rig, it was difficult to setup and tracking was far from robust compared to commercial alternatives.

Overall, the ITU GazeTracker was a great learning experience, it evolved to become most distributed open source eye tracking software and gathered an active community. At the same time, we learned what it would take to build something great. It would require us to focus and make a full time commitment.

Here we are two years later. With the launch of an truly affordable eye tracker we have taken a big step towards realizing the vision we are burning for. No longer is there a prohibiting barrier preventing developers from exploring the many benefits eye tracking can bring to their applications.

Best of all, this is still the beginning. I can't wait to get this into the hands of all the developers who placed a $99 bet on the future.

Tech specs (preliminary)

Sampling rate	40Hz and 60Hz mode
Accuracy	0.5° (average)
Spatial Resolution	0.1° (RMS)
Latency	<20ms at 60Hz
Calibration	5, 9, 12 points
Operating range	45cm – 75cm
Tracking area	40cm x 40cm at 65cm distance
Screen sizes	Up to 24”
API/SDK	C++, C# and Java included
Data output	Binocular gaze data
Dimensions (W/H/D)	20 x 1.9 x 1.6 cm (7.9 x 0.75 x 0.66 inches)
Weight	130g
Connection	USB3.0 Superspeed

Tough decisions, big plans and a bright future

Browsed through my blog today. Realized I hadn't written much about what I've been up to. There's been a reason for that. One year ago I left my position at Duke University. It wasn't an easy decision. The Radiology eye tracking project I was involved with (and still is) was making good progress. I had been working long days since it started at Stanford in 2009 and we were doing pretty neat stuff with volumetric medical image datasets. 

The Stanford/Duke Radiology eye tracking project and our novel approach to volumetric gaze data.

At the same time I spent nights and weekends working on the open source ITU Gaze Tracker together with Javier San Agustin. Somewhere I always had the feeling that we should get back together, great things just seemed to happen when we did. So after my grand tour of the US and countless Skype meetings over six months we had a plan. The four former PhD students from the ITU Gazegroup was to start an eye tracking company. At first we called it Senseye but later changed it to The Eye Tribe due to trademark issues. 

The Eye Tribe as of Spring 2012 at the US embassy reception. 

We decided early not to go for the established market. It's a red sea with a couple of fairly big players that have been working on their high tech creations for years, it's a low volume/high margin game with intricate and expensive solutions primarily for the research and disabled markets. 

The Eye Tribe intends to innovate and disrupt by bringing eye tracking to post-pc devices in the consumer market. It just doesn't happen with devices that costs several thousand dollars.  

After twelve months of executing our plan we recently raised funds from a group of European investors to accelerate (as covered by The Next Web). The team has grown and we are looking to make additional hires in a near future. Perhaps you would like join the tribe and be part of something great? There's some very interesting things happening in a near future, for the skilled it's always best to get on early.

One year ago I traded a warm North Carolina for a cold Copenhagen, a relationship for loneliness, a big house for a small apartment and a sport car for a bicycle. Time will tell if that was the right thing to do, with big plans, full commitment and funding in place, it is so far, so good.

The Eye Tribe presents worlds first eye controlled Windows 8 tablet

It slices, it dices! The Eye Tribe from Copenhagen introduces the worlds first Windows 8 eye tracking tablet. The small, lightweight add-on connects via USB, no additional cables or batteries needed. For the time being the specs are 30Hz, accuracy of 0.5 degrees and an exceptionally large tracking range. More info to follow.

 


The Eye Tribe, formerly known as Senseye, have made significant progress in recent months. In January they won the Danish Venture Cup. Then went on to participate in the Rice RBPC, the worlds premier business plan competition, made it to the semi-finals and was awarded "Most Disruptive Technology" while being mentioned in Fortune Magazine and Houston Chronicle. In May the team won the eHealth Innovation Contest followed by the audience award at the Danish Accelerace whereby they were selected to participate at the Tech All Stars event which gives the most promising European startups the opportunity to pitch at the LeWeb conference in London on June 20th.