Tobii's non-research oriented eyetracking models are solely compatible with their Game Integration API, which they only provide C++ and C# bindings for. While a wrapper could be written about the C++ API (using a tool like pybind11 or Swig) for Python, this can be difficult to get reliably working (I attempted to use Swig to wrap the C++ API, and while it compiled and functions could be used, it never detected the Tobii hardware).
For this reason, using a message passing protocol like ZeroMQ and a publisher (in C++) and subscriber (in the target language, in this case Python) model can be easier to implement. This repository aims to be an example for this usage.
I have tested this on Windows 11 with Visual Studio 2022. Your millage on other platforms may vary. Please file an issue if you have any problems.
Pull the repository and its submodules with theis command:
git clone --recurse-submodules --depth=1 https://github.com/kethan1/tobii-game-integration-python.git
Vcpkg is used to download the cppzmq library. To configure it, ensure that you have pulled the submodules and run these commands from the root of the repo:
cd libs/vcpkg
./bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
cd ../
Due to the license agreement for the Tobii Game Integration API, its file cannot be distributed. For this reason, you must obtain the library from https://developer.tobii.com/pc-gaming/downloads (it should take roughly <48 hours for them to send the library). Ensure that the directory follows this structure (tobii_gameintegration_<version here>). This code has been tested with version 9.0.4.26 of the library.
Make sure that you have CMake installed and a working C++ compile. If you are on Windows 11, you can install these with Visual Studio. You may be able to use MSYS2, but I have not tested this myself.
Ensure that you have configure Vcpkg. Then run these commands:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ && cmake --build .
Then, to run these C++ publisher (publishes Gaze Data), run the following command:
./Debug/eyetracker-server.exe
To run the Python subscriber, install the requirements:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Then run the recv.py script:
python recv.py