openEyes: an open-hardware open-source system for low-cost eye tracking

Eye tracking has long held the promise of being a useful methodology for human computer interaction. However, 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 system. The system consists of an open-hardware design for a digital eye tracker that can be built from low-cost off-the-shelf components, and a set of open-source software tools for digital image capture, manipulation, and analysis in eye-tracking applications. We expect that the availability of this system 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 low-cost eye tracking as well as the design decisions that produced our current system.