Move over TrackIR

Very cool! It will be interesting to hear what you think about it.  I haven't looked at their website yet.  I'm wondering how it will deal with eye glasses and if movement will feel a bit too chaotic in flight sims.  Certainly looked like it worked well in the heli.      

Initial impressions aren't great, at least for FSX. I am running it on my desktop PC and the monitor is too high and too far away for good tracking. When close enough, it is better. Close enough is about 60cm. From the specs you are also limited to a 27" monitor and your head needs to stay within a particular (but fairly large) box - obviously, I suppose.

The tracking is impressive but not as precise as you might imagine. The various ways of displaying you eye movements show that the target actually wobbles considerably in the general vicinity of where you are looking. Targeting particular Windows menu items, for example, kind of relies on clever disambiguation algorithms.
(I think I just made a word up there but you should get what I mean.)

For FSX (like many games) it uses a program called 'Infinite Screen', which (again, at first impression) I don't like. You may wonder, as I did, how this can work compared to something like TrackIR. For example, when you look at the edge of the screen it needs to rotate the view. What it seems to do is if you are looking significantly off-centre, it starts the view rotating and doesn't stop until you are looking straight ahead again (with a tweakable dead zone). This doesn't feel natural at all. I also found the performance very glitchy, although admittedly I am running it on my desktop PC, an older 2.83GHz quad core.

It does, BTW, work with the boxed FSX (the web site seems to suggest it needs the Steam Edition but it doesn't). And it does require USB3 - the USB cable it comes with is very chunky, which presumably reflects the amount of power it uses. It uses three pulsed IR emitters and presumably at least one camera in the device to receive reflections. Oh, and it can work with spectacles, I was doing so.

So far this is an interesting thing to tinker with that shows the potential of the technology. There are a few apps to download and try out, all apparently written with Unity, which I think is an open game development system. The quality is variable. There are some commercial games too and I guess the quality of those would be better.

Verdict - maybe don't rush out and buy one just yet if it's just for FSX!

Ouch! Is that USB power? That's a serious over-current! There would have to be something seriously wrong with the EyeX, if that's the case.

Did you see Froogles review of the EyeX?

I had a chance to fool around with one of these last week at work. I did not like it for one fundamental reason: eye tracking is quite a bit different then head tracking. With head tracking, I can turn my head to the right in order to see out of the right cockpit window, and while remaining in that view, move my eyes anywhere in said field of view without the view itself moving. This simulates what happens in real life. With eye tracking, the field of view is moved as my eyes move. This is not at all like what happens in real life. In real life I move my head around to point in a general direction, and then move my eyes to focus on something or anything in that field of view. Moving my eyes in a particular direction does not cause my head to turn in that same direction. This is what eye tracking, in my experience, seems to be doing.

Well, they didn't find anything wrong. Meanwhile, I have lost faith in the CSL USB3 interface card after reading about another fire in the Amazon reviews.

That said, Tobii agreed to refund me but then didn't do so and stopped responding to my emails. I had to jump through PayPal's hoops to recover the money, but they have been supportive while Tobii simply failed to respond. So +1 to PayPal, and I'd say avoid Tobii Technology AB. (And cheap CSL interface cards.)