A low-cost, high-performance alternative to expensive video-based eye trackers

Eye tracking is an integral part of psychophysical research in cognitive science. However, commercial eye trackers can be prohibitively expensive for many labs around the world. We developed a binocular eye tracker that performs either as well as or better than a well-known and successful commercial system, but at a small fraction of the cost.

The eye tracker is described in a new article at the Journal of Eye Movement Research, in a Special Thematic Issue on Eye Tracking Methods and their Assessment of Data Quality. The paper can be read here.

An important advantage of our eye tracker is that it allows binocular measurements with great ease, which allows us to investigate binocular coordination of small eye movements, including fixational eye movements.

The work was part of a collaboration with the lab of Frank Schaeffel, as part of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre on Robust Vision (SFB 1233). Moreover, demos, software, and instructions are all available for download.

In that same Collaborative Research Centre, we also previously developed an important analysis tool for analyzing eye movements! You can read more about it here, including a newly available GUI interface for this analysis tool!