On-screen instructions told me when my distance from the screen was correct (about 45 to 90 cm, by Tobii’s recommendation). The circles grew larger if I leaned forward and smaller if I leaned back. These dots roughly moved along with my head and occasionally winked on and off unless I held perfectly still. The next screen in the setup process declared “these are your eyes” before two white circles appeared. Next up was the calibration process, which is where things started to fall apart for me. After that, the software showed me a screen that allowed me to manually adjust the alignment of the tracker by lining up arrows on the screen with marks on the tracker itself, just in case the unit wasn’t installed perfectly on-center. When I plugged mine in for the first time, the utility took a couple minutes to apply the latest firmware to the tracker. With the pad in place, the actual installation of the EyeX is as simple as it gets: the magnets grab onto the metal strip, and it more or less self-aligns.īefore you plug the EyeX into the prerequisite USB 3.0 port, you’ll want to install the device’s companion software. If you decide to try an EyeX out for yourself, be sure you have the pad level and centered before sticking it on. The adhesive on the pad is aggressive stuff, not something that can easily be adjusted or removed after it’s in place. The EyeX attaches to your monitor using magnets in its body and a metal pad with an adhesive backing. This $140 controller is available directly from Tobii’s website. My review is of the stand-alone EyeX, but there is at least one laptop that has the technology built-in: MSI’s GT72S G Tobii. That information is used by the EyeX software to control cursor movement on the desktop or camera orientation in games, to give just two examples. The EyeX uses infrared LEDs and cameras to see your face and track what your eyes are looking at on-screen. So what exactly is the EyeX? It’s a specialized input device designed to allow certain aspects of the computing experience to be controlled by your eyes. That said, there are some universal facts about the device that I can share, regardless of how well it worked for me. Everyone else that tested out the controller during my time with it had much smoother experiences than I did. I believe that it’s important to note up front that part of what you’re about to read is clearly not a typical EyeX experience. I never would have guessed that I’d be thinking back on multiple trips to my optometrist and optician, plus the experience of trying out contacts for the first time in my life. When I volunteered to review the Tobii EyeX eye-tracking controller, I had no idea I was signing up for over a month of experimentation and frustration.
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