RESEARCH MEETS REAL-WORLD: TOBII GLASSES 2 REDEFINES WEARABLE EYE TRACKING

The Analysis Division of Tobii Technology, the leader in eye-tracking research solutions announced the launch of Tobii Glasses 2, the lightest and most advanced wearable eye-tracking research system in the world. Based on a new, proprietary, wearable eye-tracking platform from Tobii that will support research and consumer applications, Tobii Glasses 2 offers unprecedented functionality including wireless live viewing and opens up new opportunities for human behaviour research and discoveries in real-world environments.

“Our new Tobii Glasses 2 offers amazing opportunities to obtain real-world gaze data in real time, which provides great value for a wide range of users,” said Tom Englund, president of Tobii Technology Analysis Solutions. “In addition to offering live viewing, we’ve made the technology easier to use and more affordable, which supports our mission to help more researchers use wearable eye tracking to generate new insights and discoveries.”

The Tobii Glasses 2 Eye Tracker is capable of supporting a wide range of research projects and experience levels from first-time eye-tracking users working on one-time studies to researchers experienced in eye tracking needing advanced functionality for comprehensive analytical projects. The applications and uses for wearable eye-tracking research spanmany industries, including in-store shopper marketing, user experience and psychology.

In 2010, Tobii revolutionised the category of wearable eye-tracking technology by introducing the original Tobii Glasses, a first-of-its-kind wearable eye tracker for research professionals.

“Over the past four years, we have witnessed incredible new discoveries in shopper marketing, behavioural science and usability research that had not been possible before Tobii Glasses,” said Barbara Barclay, general manager of Tobii North America. “Tobii Glasses 2 offers a number of new features that will advance wearables significantly in all these fields but also open up a multitude of new research applications, providing a higher degree of ease of use, efficiency, flexibility and unobtrusiveness.”

Key new features of Tobii Glasses 2 include:

• Live View – Tobii Glasses 2 provides a live viewing feature that allows researchers to watch a video stream of exactly what a person is looking at, wirelessly and in real time on any Windows 8 tablet, while moving around freely in any environment. This feature is very easy to use, even for first-time users, and serves as an extremely valuable tool for a wide variety of qualitative research.

• True View – Tobii Glasses 2 is equipped with a wide-angle 1080p HD scene camera and four eye cameras, all built into a thin frame. This gives the wearer complete freedom of view and enables for the first time high-quality eye tracking of the “true view” of what participants see in large gaze angles, including peripheral sight. This feature, unique to Tobii Glasses 2, makes it possible to conduct studies of activities that naturally involve peripheral viewing, such as driving.

• Flexible Mapping – Tobii Glasses 2 offers a new flexible manual mapping tool that significantly reduces time for coding videos with gaze data. This feature helps researchers more quickly and easily aggregate and process data from multiple participants related to specific objects in the study environment, such as a store shelf or a second screen.

• Light, Unobtrusive Design – At 45 grams in weight, the Tobii Glasses 2 head-unit is by far the lightest in the world and looks and feels almost like a regular pair of sport glasses. These characteristics allow participants to have maximum mobility, be less distracted by the testing process and behave naturally, giving researchers’ confidence in gaining valid insights. This is especially helpful in testing that involves a lot of physical movement, such as sports research.

• Efficient Workflows – System-guided procedures and quick calibration provide an efficient workflow and make it easy for anyone to start using the system. The system tracks a large cross section of the population, which helps reduce field time and overall research project costs.

Through Tobii’s extensive training programs and the Tobii Insights division, a services unit of Tobii Technology established in 2011, customers who need training or want to outsource any part of their eye-tracking research project can benefit from the global eye-tracking expertise of the Tobii team.

“Eye tracking is a valuable way to deepen our understanding of what is happening at shelf. The new wireless glasses from Tobii will allow us to watch the shopper in real-time and create a more dynamic environment to observe shopper’s behavior,” said Gill Aitchison, Ipsos Global President for Shopper and Retail. “At Ipsos, we believe that layering various neuroscience measurements such as eye tracking on top of more conventional research allows us to see the full picture and really drive shopper insights to grow sales.”

Tobii Glasses 2 package options range from Live View packages (USD 14,900/EUR 11,900) to Premium Analytics packages (USD 29,900/EUR 24,900) for the full spectrum of qualitative and quantitative analysis. A 12-month subscription option is also available for the Premium Analytics package (USD 800/EUR 600 per month). Orders can be placed starting today and shipments are expected to begin in October 2014.

Tobii’s new wearable eye-tracking platform will open up possibilities to sync data input from a variety of wearable devices. For software developers or OEMs interested in creating innovative new applications for research, sports, consumer technology, gaming, automotive, medical and a wide array of other industries, Tobii will be making a software development kit available for its new platform.