How do I generate an alert when the eye tracker gets disconnected?

[Adithi Deborah Chakravarthy]

Say I am in the middle of performing a task involving eye tracking, and the tracker loses connection/eyes, how do I generate an alert to check connection before proceeding? I understand that the disappearance of the gaze trace bubble is one such way, I am also looking for some sort of system alert. Thanks in advance.

[Grant [Tobii]]

Hi @adithideborah and thanks for your query. It would be helpful if you could kindly elaborate on the software and hardware you are working with.

I am afraid we have no out of the box solution to run directly for generating disconnect alarms however assuming you are using the Tobii Core SDK in conjunction with either the Tobii Tracker 4C or EyeX, then to generate an alert as to whether or not tracking has been lost, we would recommend using the EngineStateValue state as described @ https://tobii.github.io/CoreSDK/articles/states.html

If you require some guidance in getting started with the Core SDK, then I would encourage you to download our sample applications which you may be able to tailor for your specific needs rather than starting from scratch. Please find the samples @ https://github.com/Tobii/CoreSDK
Specifically, the Interaction_States_102 sample demonstrates how to use the EngineStateValue to determine if a user is being properly tracked or not.

You can also look at the https://tobii.github.io/CoreSDK/api/Tobii.Interaction.EngineStateProvider.html to retrieve further information about the Eye Tracker hardware state if needed.

Please let us know if we can be of any further help for your project. Best Wishes.

[Adithi Deborah Chakravarthy]

Thank you for the response. I am working on the Core SDK with EyeX. I found the Interactors_101 and States_102 to be useful. Hopefully I convert the console messages to alert boxes and also find a workaround the sensitivity of the tracker.

[Adithi Deborah Chakravarthy]

I have integrated the Interaction_States_102 with my app, however sometimes my state goes to INVALID and the console displays an thread exit. Can you explain when and why this happens?

[Grant [Tobii]]

Hi @adithideborah, the EngineStateValue may return as INVALID under scenarios where you have no connection or lost connection to interaction engine. Also if you ask straight away when the observer is created you might get an invalid value since the operations is asynchronous.

Are you accordingly experiencing frequent disconnection issue? If so, might be worth ensuring that all the Tobii software and firmware are fully up to date and that USB chipset drivers (and BIOS) are also updated. Failing that, a detailed specification of your system would be useful for further diagnosis.

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