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Comment by listic | Hacker News Reader

What is the difference between EyeX and 'SteelSeries Sentry Gaming Eye Tracker' described in an article?

Can you enlarge your active area by moving the monitor further away from your head?

I guess Linux is not supported, too?

It has a depth limit, as well. It's truly a 2x2x2 cube. In my current setup, I can lean forward quite a bit, till the monitor is a little too close for comfort, but I cannot lean back at all. In playing with it, I've noticed that there's sometimes a bit of latency in the edge detection; I'll lean back, do some eye-ing for a second or two and then all of a sudden it cuts off. It gives me the impression that they're not actually enforcing a cube per se, but that their technique has increasing error rates outside of a sweet spot, and they have an errors-over-time cutoff.

I have a lot of sympathy for the difficulties in the implementation. The eye moves only a tiny amount, so you need a high-resolution camera to detect where it's looking with any accuracy (this is why they require USB 3). If the camera is already pushing the limits of inexpensive consumer camera technology, you can't easily expand its field of view without compromising accuracy.

Here's a paper that talks briefly about the technology: http://www.tobii.com/eye-tracking-research/global/library/wh...

For Linux they seem to be recommending the "Tobii REX" at a comfortable $795. Ouch. :(

And it's not even that good. We had a Rex. We gave it away. Read my post above. It gives better detail of our trials and our result.

ok, so now there's an EyeX, Rex and this newest 'SteelSeries Sentry Gaming Eye Tracker'. What's the difference? What's the point in releasing this newer thingy which is more expensive than EyeX, which I now see was available for arounf a year?

It appears they added an extra IR eye scanner module, increasing accuracy. And they're focusing on 'sell to money-is-water gamers'.

I'd wait. The zone of gaze tracking is still too small, and it's still hardware in need of a killer app.

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