Firmware update changes (Kinect V2 compaitbility)

[Markus Proell]

Hi,

when I started developing with the EyeX a few months ago it was possible to use it along with a Kinect V2 sensor. The emitted infrared of the two sensors seemed to be different enough so that the EyeX tracking quality was barely influenced.

Currently this is not possible any more. The EyeX is not able any more to track any gaze points above the bottom half of the screen. This behavior is confirmed from three different users.

So questions is, which changes could have caused this behavior and is it revertible?
A rough guess would be either the EyeX Core or firmware update that happened a few weeks ago. Did any of these alter the IR frequencies? I am not able to find any changenotes on the firmware update.

Thanks,
Best,
Markus

[Jenny [Tobii]]

Hi Markus,

There is no change in the EyeX firmware that we know of that would explain this change of behavior. On the other hand, the firmware guy I talked to said that it could be due to a number of things in the surrounding environment: “-Maybe there has been a change of light setting going from summer to autumn??”.

[Konstantin [Tobii]]

Hi,
tricky case indeed.
I agree with Jenny that Tobii hasn’t done any changes, which would have caused that (at least we’re not aware of any).
At the same time we don’t test together with Kinect V2 as Microsoft is anyways quite clear that the USB 3.0 controller should be dedicated to the Kinect. Which means, that Micrsoft knows that they need so much bandwidth that they can’t handle 2 devices using the same USB 3.0 controller.
Have a look here: https://dev.windows.com/en-us/kinect/hardware-setup

“USB 3.0 controller dedicated to the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor ”

/Konstantin

[Markus Proell]

Hey,

thank you for your replies. I understand that you don’t test against the Kinect sensors, as I can imagine that the combination of these devices is very rare indeed.

[Marius Swart]

Bit o a necrothread here, but since they stopped production on the Kinect, I decided it’s high time to get one andadd some sort of gesture based controls to *something*.
That said, I do notice a distinct degradation in Tobii eye tracker accuracy(especially at the top of the screen, with it jumping down a lot) with both active – they are also on different USB controllers and when I just put a card in front of the Kinect the eye tracker performance increases to normal levels, so it’s very likely to do with te multiple sources of IR

[Grant [Tobii]]

Hi @mswart, yes indeed since this older thread we have had time to more extensively test use of Kinect in conjunction with Tobii Eye Trackers and were able to replicate these issue of reduced trackability unfortunately.

As it stands, the only advice we can offer is not to use the products in conjunction on the same system I am afraid.

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