Looking through the Tobii Pro Glasses

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.

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.

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.

Why Snap’s Spectacles Are Going to (Finally) Make Life Logging Cool

The human desire to log the realities of everyday life is something that technology companies have been trying to turn into a successful product for years. With a new pair of smart glasses on offer, the company behind Snapchat hopes that the answer lies in simplicity.

Some of the strongest proponents of the life-logging movement have recently retired from the pursuit. But those early adopters sought to record everything, from sleep and steps to calorie intake and mood. Ultimately, they found the process difficult and unrewarding.

Google’s attempt to capitalize on the phenomenon with its Glass project struggled to take off. First announced in April 2013, the device later became available as part of the Explorer Program for the princely sum of $1,500. It was ultimately scrapped as a commercial product last year, sidelined instead to research and workplace use.

Glass had many problems. Certainly, its price made it an exclusive item. Privacy advocates worried ceaselessly about people snapping images without permission, coining the fabulous term “Glasshole”along the way. But perhaps its biggest failing was Google’s attempt to shoehorn a small computer, display, camera, microphone, and more into a diminutive frame. This was Google trying to invent the future, and failing.

Now Snap—the new name of Snapchat—thinks it can do better.

Where Glass was an exercise in speculative future-gazing, Snap’s new Spectacles are a study in pragmatism. The new sunglasses, which are styled like Ray-Bans, allow the wearer to record first-person video at the press of a button, shooting up to 30 seconds of circular video with a 115-degree field of view. The clips can then be transferred to a smartphone via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, to be added to Snapchat.

Please click here to learn more.