Locating the Camera Next to a Laptop

[arnon.hershkovitz]

Hello, Dear Colleagues!

I'm about to initiate a very interesting academic study using this wonderful product and am very excited. However, in the location I'll have for the experiment, I won't have a desktop but rather will bring my laptop. I don't have any special mount, and after a few attempts I realized that the best place to locate the camera is next to the laptop. So, the camera will stand to the left of the laptop, about 45 degree to the laptop screen.

Calibrating and testing it in this location had been successful: I was able to perfectly calibrate it, and the heatmaps indeed reflected what I was looking for.

However, I'm afraid that I'm actually doing something wrong and that from this location results couldn't be trusted, due to the non-traditional angle.

Any comments?...

Thanks,
Arnon

[Martin]

Hi Arnon,

As a general advice the best position is center and below the screen. This allows for an unobstructed view of the eyes. If the device is placed on top there's a chance that the eyelids will cover the pupil when looking downwards. Same goes for the sides, tracking might be lost when you look at the opposite site.
The size of the screen plays a role here, since laptops generally have 13-15" size it might work just fine.

For laptops I have seen a couple of solutions where the device is placed on a wedge-shaped base. One solution for 3D printing is presented in this thread.

One of the benefits of our dev.kit tracker is that it doesn't need to be precisely mounted, it will work as long as you have tracking and the device doesn't move after the calibration.

[arnon.hershkovitz]

Thanks much for this insightful reply!