Do-It-Yourself Eye Tracker: Low-Cost Pupil-Based Eye Tracker for Computer Graphics Applications

Eye tracking technologies offer sophisticated methods for capturing humans’ gaze direction but their popularity in multimedia and computer graphics systems is still low. One of the main reasons for this are the high cost of commercial eye trackers that comes to 25,000 euros. Interestingly, this price seems to stem from the costs incurred in research rather than the value of used hardware components. In this work we show that an eye tracker of a satisfactory precision can be built in the budget of 30 euros. In the paper detailed instruction on how to construct a low cost pupil-based eye tracker and utilise open source software to control its behaviour is presented. We test the accuracy of our eye tracker and reveal that its precision is comparable to commercial video-based devices. We give an example of application in which our eye tracker is used to control the depth-of-field rendering in real time virtual environment.