How to open SMI eye tracker data?

Comments

• AlexTinekov

  April 2019

  Ok, I found. In order to make life easier to other SMI tracker users:

  There is a tool to convert idf (it's a real extension of file which is generated after an experiment, I don't know why pygaze generates this file without any extension) to txt format. After this conversion you can use PyGazeAnalyzer with idfreader.read_idf. But it seems that functions for OpenSesame plugin pygaze_start_recording and pygaze_stop_recording don't write any information about trials. Obviously they should use send_message function from libsmi.py:

  https://github.com/esdalmaijer/PyGaze/blob/master/pygaze/_eyetracker/libsmi.py#L695

  So, in order to analyse your data with PyGazeAnalyzer, you should add send_message function to your inline script manually (and make sure that you have last version of pygaze, because the function was added just a month ago).
• AlexTinekov

  April 2019

  And finally it's not really hard to open results in BeGaze (not tested yet, but I'm sure that all should be fine):

  https://support.pstnet.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000852687-INFO-How-to-configure-annotations-to-an-IDF-file-and-use-these-annotations-when-analyzing-eye-tracking-data-in-BeGaze-22441-
• Edwin

  June 2019 edited June 2019

  To answer your question on why PyGaze generates an IDF rather than a text file: It's because SMI's software enforces that. (It makes sense they do so, because it's a compressed format.)

  That you didn't get a file extension is interesting. It seems we forgot to add the ".idf" extension in the PyGaze plug-ins for OpenSesame, woops! (You can simply add it to your file manually or through a renaming script.) In Python, you can include the file extension in the LOGFILE constant in your constants.py script.

  As for analysing trials, I've always used the `log` function (which has been around since the start), and log a trigger at every event of note in the experiment.

  Cheers,

  Edwin