The Eye Tribe

4 to 5 star calibration every time last week; now, can’t break past 2 stars

It’s so strange. For weeks before, I had always been able to get 4 to 5 stars every time for calibration quality. Now, I always get 1 to 2 stars, and I’ll be lucky if I get 3.

I don’t use my glasses with the eye tracker.

I’ve been testing it during evening and night, so there’s very little light (I might get one of those blackout drapes for the day) .

The position of my eye tracker has barely moved. During the time that I was getting 4 to 5 stars, I recall still being able to move the tracker around quite a bit, and still being able to get good calibration.

I’m Asian, and I have brown eyes, which I hear isn’t optimal for eye-tracking.

I use 16 points, and a maximum point sample time. I keep my eyes very wide open during the calibration.

I don’t have any heavy programs that are running when I’m testing the eye tracker.

Regardless of the conditions, they haven’t changed (I don’t think), and it seemed fine just a while ago.

My first thought was that the problems started happening right after the last update of TheEyeTribeSDK-0.9.31-x86. I uninstalled it, and installed the older TheEyeTribeSDK-0.9.28-x86, but I still got poor results (at least I think I successfully downgraded. After opening up in 0.9.28, it remembered my settings of 16 points, and max point sample time, so maybe it didn’t downgrade? Still, I think the downgrade went through, I was operating in 0.9.28, and I was still getting poor results. Therefore, I don’t think it was the update, even though the quality dropped after it.

Currently, when I’m staring at the screen with the green glow, I notice that both the animated eyes are flickering (quickly disappearing and appearing) every couple seconds. I don’t remember if the flickering was happening when I was getting good calibration. Maybe regular flickering is always there, and it’s normal?

Meh.. Maybe it’s just me.

I’ll continue to test it.

Thanks.

Looking into this. If anyone else is experiencing this please let us know.

I just attempted eight consecutive calibration tests during the day. I got six 2’s, one 3, and one 5.

Maybe those fours and fives in the past were just a fluky hot streak.

I’ll probably try again when the sun goes down, but perhaps twos and threes is what my actual normal is.

Nighttime wasn’t any better. I got four 2’s and two 1’s. I tried calibrating with my room completely dark, and I still got 2’s.

(The monitor is 76 cm away, and the eye tracker is 52 cm away).

I wonder what was going on when I was getting all those fours and fives for many days.

The feature to persist and restore a calibration over multiple boot sequences is on our roadmap.

I hope that helps in the future. Maybe I can sneak in a four or five, and have that carry me through .

I have been jumping between 28 and 31 and it's impossible to get a high calibration score in 31.
Also it seems that the smoothing is gone and the gaze coordinates jump and jitters.
Falling back to 28 helps immensely, I will try and reproduce it in an official sample to make sure it's not something i my code.

I just saw your post, pf, so I went to try downgrading to 28 again this morning.

In my earlier post, I mentioned that I wasn’t sure if I downgraded properly. The reasons were because the number of points was still 16, and the point sample time was at maximum, which are not the default.

So I uninstalled 31 using Revo uninstaller. In addition to uninstalling, I used the “Everything” search program to look for any other Eye Tribe files that I could delete.

I installed 28. This time, it shows that full screen display that says “welcome to the eye tribe developer kit”, with the “show at startup” checkbox at the bottom left-hand corner (I had previously unchecked that box). I went for a calibration, and it looks like I successfully went back to the default calibration settings, as I received fewer points, and the point sample time was faster. So now, I think I successfully downgraded.

This was my first result:


I get a perfect five stars. I try again, and I get another five stars.

In my earlier post, I also mentioned that when I’m looking at the direct feedback of the current tracking state in the EyeTribe UI (screen on the left with the animated eyes, and green background), I noticed that the eyes were flickering, and constantly disappearing and appearing.

With version 28, as I stare at the EyeTribe UI, there’s no flickering whatsoever.

Additionally, it’s a sunny day right now, with lots of ambient light, and I’m still getting five stars.

There’s a stronger chance that version 31 is the reason for the change in my calibration results.

Thanks for posting, pf.

Hi Jeff and Pf,

Seems that there is an issue with version 0.9.31. This release involved quite a lot of changes, we made some optimizations to reduce the CPU consumption. Unfortunately, it seems that this have affected the tracking robustness. We'll investigate these modifications to locate the issue and get a new version out soon.

Does anyone have a link to the previous version? I'm having the same problem...

Hi Bella,

Please see the PM I've sent you with a download link to the previous version.

We will have a fixed 0.9.31 release soon.

We have released v0.9.33, you should all get a notification when running EyeTribeUI. Please check release notes on this thread -> viewtopic.php?f=5&t=180

Those of you who were experiencing tracking issues, please let us know if this new version has improved things.