The Eye Tribe

I'm very happy to have received my new EyeTribe tracker today, but have 3 smallish issues;

1.No EyeTribe.cfg file is generated in AppData\Local\EyeTribe, nor in C:\EyeTribe. I've searched the whole hard disk and also tried running the server and client as administrator, as well as normally. Nothing. I, therefore, cannot change the framerate from 30 to 60. I do have the tetbasicsettings.xml file in the AppData\Local\EyeTribe folder, but adding <FrameRate>60</FrameRate> does nothing.

2.My eyes are detected well and I can achieve a perfect configuration, however, they are always displayed (in the TrackBox control) at a slight angle, as if I were tilting my head to the side. They are also a little off centre, despite my head being central to the display and the tracker stable and level.

3.My system feels a bit sluggish/stutters when the server & client are running. The CPU is not under a big load (10-15% evenly across all 4 cores) and the disk is not being used at all. I cannot see a reason for it, but it feels as if the system is being taxed. Is it possible my GPU is being smashed? GazeTracker didn't use the GPU (I believe) so I doubt EyeTribe does, but any help would be appreciated.

Thanks for any help. My setup details are below...

My setup:
New ASUS N550LF laptop with all unnecessary bloatware removed (including McAfee)
Windows 8.1
15.6" screen
8GB ram
Intel Core i7-4500 @ 1.80 GHz (2..40GHz with Turbo Boost)

Hi Julius,

Let's try to resolve the smallish issues you have

1. For version 0.9.36 the EyeTribe.cfg is no longer automatically created. The preferred method is now arguments to the server. To start in 60fps mode create a shortcut containing "C:\Program Files (x86)\EyeTribe\Server\EyeTribe.exe" -f=60 alternatively you can create the EyeTribe.cfg file and paste the json contents to it. We need to update the docs to describe this better.

2. It should work just as well even if you are not 100% centered. The sensor is placed with a small offset (~10mm) to the right due to the tripod threads.

3. We're not offloading to the GPU at the moment so what you see in the Performance Monitor is the total load. At the moment we have optimized the algorithms a fair bit to have good performance when there is tracking (on my desktop (core i5) it consumes about 2-5%). However, when there is no tracking the consumption goes up a little too much and we are working on that. If you look at the individual processes using the Resource Monitor, how much is used by the "EyeTribe.exe" versus "EyeTribeUIWin.exe" ?

Hi Martin,

Thanks for your reply. My comments;

1.Thank you, the command line arg worked perfectly.

2.Ok that makes sense. From experimentation I either have to pan the tracker slightly to the left (i.e. from above the tracker is angled a few degrees clockwise away from being parallel to the screen), or keep the tracker parallel to the screen, but move the whole tracker a little to the left. I presume keeping it parallel to the screen is the better option. I am using a laptop so have the tracker mounted on a piece of Blu Tack just beyond my keyboard, under the screen. I cannot easily use the tripod as it straddles the keyboard and sits too high, obscuring part of the screen.

3.From a bit of playing around I observe the following trends:

TRACKING BOTH EYES (Remote binocular / not calibrated):
"EyeTribe.exe" (server) uses around 15-25% CPU
"EyeTribeUIWin.exe" (UI/client) uses around 2-5% CPU

TRACKING ONE EYE (Remote monocular / not calibrated) - I achieved this my making it lose both eyes and then moving just one eye into view:
"EyeTribe.exe" (server) uses around 60% CPU
"EyeTribeUIWin.exe" (UI/client) uses <1% CPU

TRACKING NO EYES (not calibrated):
"EyeTribe.exe" (server) uses up to 80% CPU
"EyeTribeUIWin.exe" (UI/client) uses <1% CPU

I then calibrated and then replicated the above scenarios observing that the CPU usage was the same as above so it doesn't look like calibration changes the CPU utilisation in each scenario.

CPU utilisation is based on Task Manager's CPU utilisation numbers by process. I can add that the load is fairly even across all four cores.

Hope that's useful to you. Let me know if I can provide any more information; I am working on a personal C# project which will use output from the EyeTribe so I'd be happy to help.

Regards,
Julius

Hi Julius,

Ok. The numbers seems a bit high. It should stay below 10% when there's tracking.

When I switched from Windows 7 to 8.1 there was a moment of confusion when I looked at the CPU load in the Task Manager. It wasn't until I launched the Resource Monitor (second tab, link at bottom) that I got the actual numbers.

Do you see the same numbers in both Task Manager and Resource Monitor?

Hi Martin,

Ok the numbers are better in Resource Monitor (I'll have to read up on the difference).

TRACKING BOTH EYES (Remote binocular):
"EyeTribe.exe" (server) uses around 10% CPU
"EyeTribeUIWin.exe" (UI/client) uses around 1-5% CPU

TRACKING ONE EYE (Remote monocular):
"EyeTribe.exe" (server) uses around 50% CPU
"EyeTribeUIWin.exe" (UI/client) uses <1% CPU

TRACKING NO EYES:
"EyeTribe.exe" (server) uses up to 60-70% CPU
"EyeTribeUIWin.exe" (UI/client) uses <1% CPU

Regards,
Julius