At 240 Hz black-white swiching, i wouldn’t expect to see any flicker, just constant grey --flicker-fusion frquency and all that. If anything were wrong, PTB would flood the screen with warning messages, so if you don’t see that, and no/no many reported missed flips, then all is likely good. At a 4 msecs cycle time i could see the sawtooth being a bit deformed, hard to sample such short-period cycles perfectly anymore. VBLSyncTest can give you more asessments, but sounds to me like no cause for worries.
Perfect, thank you all!
It turns out that my Tobii Pro Nano is not compatible with Linux… which is very annoying… So I guess I will have to go back to Windows for my study…
Thanks for your help!
Sorry to hear that. Please let Tobii know that you’d like to have Linux support for that device, maybe they take customer feedback into account. I could imagine that this being a 60 Hz eye tracker, running it in a Windows VM may work well enough, just passing through the USB port to the VM.
One company that I learned about recently, which makes eye trackers with open-source software that work nicely on Linux is “Pupil labs” (https://pupil-labs.com/). My girlfriend currently uses one of these for her research under Linux and is so far happy with it. I think a commercial open-source eye tracking solution is something to endorse here.
Yes I did that already. They said they would submit my feedback to the Research and Development team to possibly add the Tobii Nano to work with Linux.
I can definitely try this yes, thanks for the suggestion!
Noted! Yes, I came across this company as well in the past, but we were looking for a more display-oriented device as the ones Tobii has. I’ll keep Pupil Labs in mind for the future though.
Yeah, it is annoying that Tobii has variable OS support considering its high price, I’ve also complained to them about this… Tobii do have Linux drivers (at least for the commercial-use 4C), but they don’t maintain them. To be fair their SDK is cross-platform, which is better than some other eyetracking products.
Pupil labs are much much cheaper and their software seems very flexible, I also wish they made a display solution…
The whole state of eye tracking is such a mess. Neither the hardware nor software is particularly challenging to produce, yet like much scientific equipment low demand and high requirements results in crazy pricing. Tobii made a low-cost consumer device with great hardware that worked really well in a research setting[1] and functioned cross-platform, but as this was priced hundreds of times less than their official research trackers, they ended up using licencing requirements and software restrictions to block its use.
[1] Gibaldi A, Vanegas M, Bex PJ, & Maiello G (2017) “Evaluation of the Tobii EyeX Eye tracking controller and Matlab toolkit for research.” Behavior research methods49 (3), 923-946 https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-016-0762-9
I bumped into this post while I was looking for the right Tobii SDK that works with the EyeX but that it seems impossible to retrieve from any of the Tobii websites.
Does this means that if I don’t have this SDK it’s basically impossible to use the EyeX? I tried to contact Tobii a few times but they never got back.