Is it possible to use an SMI RED 500 eye tracker without the iView X SDK?

Jakob_

I want to use an SMI RED 500 eye tracker. Previously, my institute used SMI Experiment Center to use the eye tracker, however, the installation broke and we're now looking to replace it with something.

We currently want to use the SMI RED 500 eye tracker together with OpenSesame. In my understanding, this is possible, and would in turn use the PyGaze library.

It seems like PyGaze doesn't talk to the eye tracker directly, but communicates with the iView X SDK (which appears to consist of a local server that talks to the eye tracker and a DLL local client that talks to that server, the latter being used by PyGaze).

Using iView X has two major downsides for us:

• It is proprietary.
• It is only available for Windows.

My question is therefore: Is it possible to use an SMI RED 500 eye tracker without iView X SDK?

There is the 13-year old library libsmi which seems like it doesn't use the iView X SDK and could be used instead of PyGaze, however, it also talks about using the serial port (which the SMI RED 500 doesn't have) and might therefore not work.

Is there anything else I could do to avoid iView X?

sebastiaan

Hi @Jakob_ ,

I don't have access to an SMI Red 500 myself, so this reply is based on my general understanding and not on direct experience. But tentatively I'd say that, no, using the SMI Red 500 without the iView X SDK isn't possible. Your description of the way that PyGaze connects to the eye tracker is, as far as I understand it, correct. Since everything about this is closed-source, there is likely no way to bypass iView X (short of reverse engineering everything).

— Sebastiaan

Jakob_

Hi @sebastiaan,

I feared as much. Thank you for your quick reply. Then I will not waste time on getting everything to run without the iView X SDK.

Best,

Jakob

thornt9

Jakob,

I am about to go down a similar path, but I can't find iView X SDK, did you previously have this or did you find it somewhere online?

Thanks!

David

Jakob_

Hi David,

I previously had the iView X SDK installed on the computer shipped with the eye tracker.

As SMI was dissolved, you probably won't get the SDK from them directly any more. Maybe there are alternative sources online?

My project ultimately failed, by the way. I only got the eye tracker running with the original proprietary Experiment Center package. That is not to say it is impossible to get it to work with OpenSesame, but it might be a tricky task.

Best of luck for you!

Jakob