YET is your Eye Tracker
Humans are visual animals and human eyes are said to be a window to the soul. Gaze behaviour can be recorded with eye tracking devices and this has become essential in a variety of domains, such as user interface design, product design and marketing. Eye tracking is also relevant for basic research on cognition, learning, and last but not least, social behavior, as our eyes are not just windows, they also speak ;)
Every Biology student is trained in using a microscope, of course. Following this analogy, wouldn't you expect that every Social Sciences student (at a Technical University) is trained in using eye tracking apparatus? Unfortunately, professional eye tracking apparatus carries hefty price tags, and therefore is more often kept in the vault, with the other magic items. Etmerald, a WSV-funded project under Martin's lead took it on to bring eye tracking to the people. In dislike of magic, they started from the assumption that, an eye tracker is a camera pointing to the eyeball and a piece of software for image analysis, simply.
A few months later, the project returns with an ultra-low budget hardware solution and a fully open-source software chain. The first eye tracking device, YET0, is using a cheap USB endoscope camera and a small 3D-printed part. The eye tracking software is written in Python, using the computer vision library OpenCV for image processing and Pygame for programming interactive experiments. Currently, 80 bachelor students in Psychology are taking a course in Python to create their own eye tracking applications on YET. Early observations suggest, that YET may be more than a classroom toy.
More information on YET and how to make one for yourself is available at (https://schmettow.github.io/YET/) or on request (m.schmettow@utwente.nl).