Home Forums Software Development [Solved] Enabling Tobii Eye Tracking programmatically C# Reply To: [Solved] Enabling Tobii Eye Tracking programmatically C#

#8498
Grant [Tobii]
Keymaster

Hi @chrisschaefer @thomas6886, thanks for your patience in allowing me to formulate for you a detailed respose to your queries.

Tobii are of the belief that the user, and only the user, should have the right to totally shut eye tracking off. If any app could shut it off we could have potentially numerous support issues where the eye tracker doesn’t work, only to discover it has been shut off by another application.

We have several use cases that are system wide; For example for impaired people, business security services (e.g detect if someone is peeking over your shoulder or locking the computer when you are not present for example), battery saving features (turn off display when you are not present), and so on.
All of these would stop working if we let any app turn off the tracker.

Indeed, there may be cases where it would make sense to turn the tracker off, watching full screen video for example, but we can’t control what the client app is doing and we can’t make sure the tracker would be turned back on. That would need some complex security feature with detecting what app is in front, if it is full screen, having user’s consent, automatically restore, etc.

As Tobii has developed, our goal is that it should be a natural part of every computer. Back in the days of the GazeSDK the use cases were very limited and there were no security features. Anyone could to anything and had access to everything which for us resulted in numerous issues both for consumer and our support team.

I appreciate your disappointment in this case, but I hope this helps you understand our perspective.