DLL load failure (tobii-research)

ChrIm

I've been having the same issue with my Tobii trackers for a while now, namely that a DLL load failure occurs whenever I try to run an experiment (specifically that it fails to find tobii_research_interop, even though it's clearly in the correct folder). Previously, I thought this was caused by the tobii-research package only being compatible with Python 3.5 and 3.6, which made sense.

Today, I decided to give it another shot after discovering that the package has recently been updated to be compatible with 3.10, and that version 4.0 of OS has been released. To my surprise, the issue still persists. What would be the best way to handle this problem?

Previously, I dealt with it by installing an older version of OS via Anaconda, but the latter stop working for me due to new company policies, so a solution without Anaconda would be preferable :)

(On a sidenote, installing tobii-research via pip or conda is still impossible and the whl file is allegedly incompatible, so I had to resort to copying the files from the SDK. I don't think this is directly related to the issue, but it's worth mentioning I suppose)

Thank you in advance!

sebastiaan

Hi @ChrIm ,

Currently, the tobii-research package is only available for Python 3.10. This is a strict requirement, so it really won't work with any other version of Python. OpenSesame 3.3 is (for Windows) based on Python 3.7, and OpenSesame 4.0 is based on Python 3.11. This means that you cannot install the tobii-research package directly into the standard Windows packages of OpenSesame.

See also:

• https://osdoc.cogsci.nl/4.0/manual/eyetracking/tobii/

Previously, I dealt with it by installing an older version of OS via Anaconda, but the latter stop working for me due to new company policies, so a solution without Anaconda would be preferable :)

Because of above reason, you indeed need to build your own Python environment, and the easiest to do that is using Anaconda. I'm not sure what kind of restrictions your company imposes, but perhaps one workaround is to:

• Build an Anaconda environment with OpenSesame using Python 3.10 on a non-restricted computer
• Zip the folder corresponding to the environment
• Copy the zip file to your company's computer
• Unzip it there and run!

If you want a more systematic solution, you could also take a look at the scripts that are used to build the Windows packages and see if you can modify them for Python 3.10. These scripts are mainly for internal use, though, so it's not very well documented. (Essentially, the OpenSesame packages for both Windows and Mac OS are also just zipped Anaconda environments.)

• https://github.com/open-cogsci/opensesame-windows-build-scripts

Hope this helps!

— Sebastiaan