Beam Eye Tracker

[chrispbits]

The Beam Eye Tracker is getting quite a bit of coverage at the moment and after using it for a couple of days I can see why. I bought Beam Eye Tracker yesterday for a little over £23 and if you already have a web cam that's not much at all for what is a pretty good head and eye tracker. I didn't but an inexpensive Creative web cam is still good value for the end result.

I don't have TrackIR so can't compare the two but suspect if you already have that then Beam wouldn't add to anything you already have, apart from doing away with the head gear. I'm still going through the process of finding the best set up - it's quite sensitive and I'm trying to find the sweat spot that avoids a too rapid movement of the view. I disabled eye tracking early on as head tracking is more than sufficient on my monitor.

If you don't already have a head/eye track then Beam is definitely worth a look for the price.

[Airspeed]

Hi Chris,
Thanks for that HU.
Sounds like a cheaper, and less cluttered option to VR headsets.
I'll read up on it

[DaveG]

I tried the demo briefly last night, seems to work OK, although it will take a bit of setting up and getting used to.

[Paul K]

I've got both Track IR and Tobii - but anything new is always of interest.

[Tako_Kichi]

I had three TackIR units and used them for years but they all died in the same way. They worked fine for in/out, up/down and looking to the right but as soon as I tried to look left they would freeze until I looked to the middle again. I reported the issue to NP's support team and we worked on the problem for a while but they were as baffled as I was as to why they all failed in the same way!

I tried Track Hat after that but never really clicked with their hardware/software (older low-res webcam and buggy software) and I suspect this new software might be similar to the Track Hat stuff (OpenTrack).

I will be following progress reports with interest.

[chrispbits]

Hi Larry, Beam uses Opentrack and this is where the fine calibration takes place. Other then eye tracking Beam has no separate calibration process. I'm impressed with Beam and it appears to work well in all directions although I had to move my camera to below my monitor for best results.

If you have Tobii Paul you're probably not going to see anything from Beam that you already have. I suspect Beam will take sales from Tobii purely on cost grounds.

Setup does take a bit of fiddling Dave - not onerously so but certainly not out-of-the-box ready as some seem to be saying albeit this is mainly down to settings in Opentrack.