Tobii eyeX review: The ‘eye mouse’ is magical, but just not for everyone - evansanianded

What if you simply could move your cursor to where you wanted, automatically, without your manpower ever leaving the keyboard? Tobii's eye-tracking technology sounds like magic, yet doesn't quite live upwardly to the promise.

Keyboard shortcuts, trackpads, and thumb mice were all invented to solve cardinal job: how to keep your hands on your keyboard, typing away, while your focus drifts from screen to screen Oregon icon to icon. Normally, your hand would move a mouse operating theatre trackpad to push your pointer around the screen. Tobii's eyeX eye-trailing technology tries to cut off the wholesaler: It bounces near-infrared light off your retinas to produce patterns that the eyeX sensors capture and interpret. Tap a identify on your keyboard, and your cursor leaps to the spot.

Doesn't that sound amazing? And if you're one of the group of populate born with eyes that the eyeX adores, so the $139 eyeX sensor is probably accurate enough to replace your mouse. It also adds Windows Hello capabilities to Windows 10 PCs, and provides an special dimension to your PC games. But there are some gotchas, too: The eyeX's truth varies from user to drug user, and the sensor measure works with just a single monitor. Because the eyeX also bonds to that monitor semi-permanently, it makes the eyeX a purchase that you may not be able to return.

[Editor's Note: At insistence time, the eyeX was sold out until middle-March.]

A rather permanent solution

Setting up the eyeX is comparatively intuitive. The eyeX is a 0.8 x 0.6 x 12.5-inch sensor bar, which connects to your reckoner via a short USB 3.0 cable. (If you wont a USB computer mouse and keyboard, make sure you have enough available ports.) There's also a small metallic mount, which the sensor bar "grabs" magnetically.

The Tobii eyeX mount blends into your supervise, but information technology's too pretty a good deal stuck there for good.

That's the first catch: On the back of the mount is an adhesive dismantle—more alike super glue than tape, regrettably. The backing of necessity to be strong enough to securely hold the 0.2-pound sensor barricade, and Tobii says that, once installed, the mount will embody "permanently" warranted. Fortunately, Tobii's installation software includes an on-screen guide that helps ensure the mount is positioned properly, on widescreen monitors sized equal to 27 inches. Bonding the metal denude to a desktop monitor shouldn't affect it (unless IT covers improving the monitor's controls), simply I decidedly wouldn't recommend mounting the eyeX to a Coat or a laptop computer, where the sensor would likely block display area.

Overcharge Schultz

Once installed, the eyeX magnetically clicks on to the ride, watching you with its three infrared eyes. It connects to your PC via a USB 3.0 cable that supplies power.

Erst mounted, the Windows 10-compatible software checks for any firmware updates, then guides you direct a brief setup process where you're asked to gaze at several dots in the corners of the screen. (You take the option of letting the eyeX raceway either eye, or both, to compensate for amblyopia or early conditions.) Tobii will also show you where it thinks your eyes are looking as part of this configuration procedure, giving you the first cue of how accurate the Tobii eyeX is. All of this information is saved to a profile file happening your data processor.

Tobii

Tobii's configuration package lets you see where Tobii thinks your eyes are looking: the pink dots near the center of the screen.

Don't tactile property like you need to sit like a statue to use the eyeX, either; the sensor bar testament track your eyes as you travel. Technically, the sensor will always track you within a 16 x 12-inch "headbox," between 13 and 37 inches away from the screen—which, chances are, is where your head is ordinarily.

An eye shiner and more

Tobii claims that you should buy the eyeX for ii reasons: American Samoa a general data input device for your computer, and as a gaming peripheral. We tried both. A third marketing point—to summate Windows Hello capabilities to your estimator—was added as we began examination, and we can confirm that feature too whole kit and boodle.

You might think of the eyeX atomic number 3 an "eye shiner," but there's more thereto than fair-minded that. Once calibrated, the eyeX allows you to assign a keyboard central as a mouse button, so that you can take a spot on the screen, click the key, and—zip!— your pointer teleports there. (You can tell the eyeX to automatically "click" that spot as well, if you want.) You buns likewise "knockoff" your shiner, warp IT back and Forth betwixt two points—multipurpose if you're jump back and forth between two pages of text, perhaps.

Tobii's eyeX package streamlines some of the more common Windows tasks.

Presence is also financed: You rear end configure the eyeX to dim your screen or lock your Microcomputer when your eyes aren't detected, while Windows Howdy will log you back in.

You can't exist sure how it will work for you

So how accurate is the eyeX? Officially,Tobii admits it doesn't know. Only Tobii president Oscar Werner told me the eyeX is generally accurate to nigh 0.5 to 1 degree of arc, or about a centimeter Oregon so of deflexion connected a laptop computer screen. The idea, He said, is that users wish jump the cursor to the general domain, then use the touchpad for fine-tuning—which, in my mind, partly defeats the purpose for buying IT in the first range.

We asked each tester to look at each successive word in Red, then try to jump the pointer there using the Tobii eyeX centre tracker.

The eyeX does allow for this, though. The Settings menu includes an alternative to warp your cursor only after you've moved your finger on the trackpad. This eliminates every the swipe-swipe-swipe trackpad gestures that are commonly needed to propel the cursor from unrivaled corner of the screen to the other, and allows the trackpad to just "Din Land" the cursor where you want.

As for overall performance, your mileage really will vary. A  number of variables look to affect how accurately the eyeX performs: the size and shape of your eye, its colour, as comfortably As the size of the "target" you're trying to collide with with your gaze. Werner as wel said that eyeX's research found that individuals with thickheaded bifocals or "droopy eyelids" also have a thorny time.

In my personal use, with a 24-in BenQ 1080p monitor in my home agency, I saved the eyeX just somewhat too inaccurate to be useful. My pointer would leap to within a word or two in a block of text, rather than a specific character, forcing me to move my computer mouse or my thumb. I fared a second better bouncing between the large text fields on our message management page—but again, without quite an the truth I was hoping for.

Therein test, we recorded what words our testers in reality "bang" when aiming for the template.

I successfully navigated between tabs in my Chrome web browser, though, perhaps because that was one of the few applications specifically named as compatible with the eye tracker. (I tranquillise now and then closed tabs by fortuity, however.) Switching between the large Elevation-Pill or Snap Serve icons via your regard is also oblanceolate.

Our Tobii eyeX truth template. For each circle, we asked to each one player to "click" in one case below the line with the eyeX, then jump back out to each circle, marker their "come to" with a dot well-marked with Microsoft Paint. This was performed ten multiplication for each circle.

I suspected my see with the Tobii eyeX was a subjective united, however, so I asked several of my colleagues—whose optic shapes varied, and some of whom wore specs—to test out the eyeX themselves after creating their own eyeX profile. My test was a fairly five-needled ace. I drew a series of progressively smaller target circles happening the screen victimization Microsoft Paint, past asked my colleagues to click back and forth crosswise the screen, aiming for each circle ten multiplication in a row. A irregular test asked them to navigate to specific words in a page of text, recording where they ended functioning. You can take care how they fared, along with a picture of their eye, in the tables connected this page.

Mark Hachman

Our eyeX accuracy test results.

Given that the eyeX bounces light off your centre, I suspected the eyeX would perform better when used aside users with a larger target field: i.e., bulky eyes. The accuracy scads from a pair of female coworkers seemed to support that theory—in point of fact, one of them recorded nigh a perfect scotch. Just as you can see from the results, that wasn't necessarily the case across the board. On that point's really overmuch variation in the data for me to feel confident exit beyond that one wide generalization, and it's intimately undoable to say how the eyeX will act upon with your eyes.

A different aspect at games

Tobii also recommends the eyeX for use with games, which require support for the eyeX. I tried out Assassin's Creed: Rogue, Word of Nor, and theHunter: Primal. (A list of other supported games includes Day Z, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and others.)

A game like Assassins' Creed doesn't require the fine control of a first-person taw, and information technology was here I had my most immersive go through, navigating simply by looking at where I wanted to offer. During certain scenes the camera allowed me to look where I wanted, or concentrate on a specific reference. That's when I felt up most like I was in the game.

Still, about of the clock playing with the eyeX ma similar I was "driving" the character with my eyes, sometimes guidance my character out from behind a tree by sounding at the sides of the test. Your gaze naturally tends to digress while playing a game, and normally this isn't an issue. Just with the eyeX, you can quickly find yourself wandering noncurrent and forth. That's not a apportion-breaker, though I was happy to return to the comrade mouse and keyboard.

The eyeX besides didn't quite provide the control I hoped for. Some console games, like the Grand Thieving Auto series, provide "object assist," where the game testament lock on an opponent provided you move the targeting reticule in range. Such an arrangement seems tailor-made for the Tobii eyeX.

In general, I smel the Sami way more or less the Tobii eyeX as I did the original Lytro camera: Tobii has crafted an interesting concept that hasn't quite coalesced into a worthwhile product. Even if you get prehistoric the truth issues, constraining the eyeX to a single monitor is a serious limitation. Perhaps a line of monitors with embedded sensors is the solution.

Here's the batch: If Tobii wants to replace a dependable-and-true peripheral like the mouse, the eyeX needs to be really,truly good. For everyone. Granted, Tobii is positioning the eyeX as a sort of a similar-pointing twist/gaming peripheral/Windows Hello access device—and if that's an enthralling combine, then the eyeX may beryllium for you. In general, though, IT's a bit of a bet on—eye tracking might work wonderfully with your eyes, or IT might not. Tobii's technology, though, implicitly promises a time to come where your gaze will replace your mouse. And as fantastic American Samoa that sounds, that future is still some ways off.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/418755/tobii-eyex-review-the-eye-mouse-is-magical-but-just-not-for-everyone.html

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