Thursday 23 February 2017

Looking through the Tobii Pro Glasses

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Last week, CATCH had a detailed training session in our Home Lab for our newly purchased Tobii Pro eye-tracking equipment from Scott Hodgins, Director of Acuity ETS Ltd., authorised resellers for Tobii the UK. The glasses were purchased with kind support from the EPSRC Capital Investment for Robots and Autonomous Systems scheme.

The Tobii Pro Glasses 2 are a wearable eye-tracking system which, as well as recording the wearer’s view of the world, can also wirelessly stream a live view to a computer. Ultra-lightweight, user-centric design promotes natural viewing behaviour and ease of use, giving researchers insight into where wearers direct their gaze when interacting with their environments.

The Glasses are suitable for all ages. A strap at the back and different bridge fittings customise the glasses to practically any size of head or shape of nose. Their design ensures they also fit on top of most conventional spectacles.

At CATCH, we research, develop, evaluate and implement new technologies to enable people to live well and age well. We are very pleased to have available two pairs of Tobii Pro Glasses 2 in our Home Lab for researchers to now use for their projects.

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For many applications, the recorded video showing the wearer’s focus will be all that is required. But the Tobii Pro Lab software package offers a range of sophisticated tools to help researchers to design their experiments, record and manage their data, replay videos, and interpret and present their results. So, for instance, functions can be applied to the video to identify gaze fixations, while automatic mapping of the video data onto snapshots help to aggregate the wearers’ views on a visual field.

CATCH researchers are hoping to use the equipment to explore how humans communicate with other humans and with machines and robots.

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In the photos above, Phil Joddrell, PhD student from CATCH, is interested in tracking how users view games designed for use by people living with dementia (l); and Dr Emily Collins, a Research Fellow from Sheffield Robotics, is interested in using the glasses to track how humans interact with robots (r).  

We now encourage members of the University and our collaborators to make good use of the eye-tracking equipment. They are available for use either in the Home Lab or can be booked for short-term use outside.  

For more information, or to book some time with the glasses, please contact CATCH Centre Manager, Simon Butler.

For more information about the Tobii Pro Glasses 2 please see the Tobii website here.

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