Towards an open-hardware open-software toolkit for robust low-cost eye tracking in HCI applications

Eye tracking has long held the promise of being a useful methodology for human-computer interaction ranging from explicit control of computer interfaces to adaptive interfaces based on the user’s attentional state. A number of barriers have stood in the way of the integration of eye tracking into everyday applications, including the intrusiveness, robustness, availability, and price of eye-tracking systems. To lower these barriers, we have developed the openEyes toolkit. The toolkit consists of an open-hardware design for a digital eye tracker that can be built from low-cost off-theshelf components and a set of open-source software tools for digital image capture, manipulation, and analysis in eyetracking applications. We expect that the availability of this toolkit will facilitate the development of eye-tracking applications and the eventual integration of eye tracking into the next generation of everyday human computer interfaces. We discuss the methods and technical challenges of lowcost eye tracking as well as the design decisions that produced our current system. Finally, we discuss the benefits of an open-hardware and open-software approach as well as ways we can facilitate the integration of eye-tracking techniques into the next generation of human computer inter-