Upon completing my work as a digital interface specialist in McMaster's Human Movement Research Lab in June 2008, eye tracking was mentioned and I became curious. I searched for any open source projects that might be out there. I found only one that seemed to be of any immediate use; openEyes is the name of a project by a team of people including Derrick Parkhurst.

Derrick and his team developed an open source algorithm called Starburst, which calculates gaze by analyzing eye movement. They even developed an application that works real-time using firewire webcams, however to my (and I'm sure many other's) disappointment, it is only available as source code for linux.

I took a closer look at their software for visible spectrum eye tracking. It wasn't realtime (instead it processes previously recorded videos), but the hardware required for this seemed to be much easier to put together as a quick test. However, again to my disappointment, this did not work in a windows environment, and the instructions were written for someone with eye tracking experience and is already familiar with matlab. After many grueling hours, I taught myself how to use matlab, and modify the scripts to work in windows.

If you want to skip all the explanations, I've made a zip file available for download here, it includes instructions.

As for who I am, check my main website!