Day One - The Eye Tracker

The choosen platform to develop the software on is Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 using .NET 3.5 and the C# (C-Sharp) programming language. Not that I´m very experienced with it (just one course) but it is similar to Sun Microsystems Java language. Besides the development environment is really nice and there´s a large amount of online resources available. Since the box is running XP all ready there is absolutely no reason to mess with it (personally I run MacPro/Os X but that´s another story)

The SMI IView RED eye tracker comes with the IView software where you can calibrate the system against points on the screen as well as other configuration aspects. After turning the tracker on and launching the calibration process I could see that the tracker is working.

Screenshot of the SMI IView program.

The calibration dots to the left usually are in full screen. To the left you can see how the eye tracker measures the reflection of the IR-lights and combines this with the location of the pupil to detect and measure eye movements. This is usually referred to as corneal reflection. The infra red light shined in my face is out of the spectrum that I can perceive. More information on eye tracking.

Clearly the the computer some how receives the data since it´s drawing circles on the screen indicating where my gaze is directed. How do I get hold of this data?

Upon an external inspection I find one firewire cable going from the tracker to the computer and two cables from the image processing box to the tracker. Seems that I must read from the firewire port. Time to Google that.

Turns out that there is an Universal Eye Tracking Driver which has been developed by Oleg Spakov at the University of Tampere, Finland. Should be a good solution so that I could easily move the application to any other supported system, including those from Swedish firm Tobii Technology. After downloading and installing the driver (which comes with source code, great!) I compiled the test application in Visual Studio to try it out. When trying to choose which tracker and what port I was using it turned out that there was no support for firewire. Seems like the previous version of IView was using USB. After some correspondence with Oleg and some tries to work around the issue it was time to stop banging my head against and RTFM like one should.

Never was much for manuals in the first place. Especially when they are 400 pages thick filled with tables of ASCII codes and references to other codes or pages. Suppose it is very much to the point, if you are a German engineer that is.. Ok. Found it. The tracker data can be sent via ethernet if IView is configured to do so. Said and done, configured IView to stream data by the UDP protocol on port 4444.

Had decided not to leave until I had the data. How do I open a datagram socket in C#? A quick search on Google should solve it. Found a pice of code that seemed to work, using a thread to open a socket to the designated port and the just read what ever data that came along. If I could print the data to the console window it.. would just be an awesome end to day one.

See next post for the C# solution..