Home › Forums › Software Development › Can Eye Tracker 5 be used for research? › Reply To: Can Eye Tracker 5 be used for research?
With the endless stream of spam posts left totally unimpeded on these forums, I suspect Tobii lacks the resources, effort, or will to support their products properly. You probably won’t be seeing much help or info if at all here.
Your goal is to use a consumer device for research purposes without violating their licensing terms regarding eye tracking data, right? The link you provided already says their SDK or API licensing terms don’t allow for use with the Eye Tracker 5.
You can skip the SDK, API, and any developer license entirely by using Tobii Ghost to generate a color blob overlay in OBS to record a video of the color blob, and then use OpenCV to identify the location of the color blob as it moves around. However, this is almost certainly a violation of the ToS associated with that software. For example, let’s say John uses Tobii Ghost to stream the eye tracking data and then Mary records the stream to analyze the eye tracking data. Even though Mary never agreed to the Tobii Ghost ToS, John isn’t permitted to tell Mary to record and analyze it. There’s language in the ToS for this: “You may not encourage any third party viewer or receiver of such stream to view or analyze the stream in a manner which would constitute Analytical Use.”
So while there are ways to bypass the developer license agreement, there’s always some language in the ToS for any of the other software.
But unlike a license agreement for their SDK or API, how would they even enforce their consumer software ToS? Tobii can’t even keep the spam off their forums.
Anyway, if someone acts as John in the example and Mary independently came up with the idea while having never agreed to the ToS, then Mary tells John to use the software, then I guess it might not be a problem? You would need an unknowing mule to act as John, so that as a researcher you never agree to the ToS and never use the software, and then record the output of the unknowing mule.