Getting the best out of the Tobii Eye Tracker - First impressions matter

[Vampes]

I've recently bought a Tobii 4C tracker and have found it to be a fantastic enhancement for some games... but I had a bit of a rocky start before I fell in love with it! So for anyone thinking of buying one, here are a few tips and things to avoid to help you get the best first impression,

1) Be careful with that magnetic sticky strip when you set it up!
The 4C comes with 2 magnetic strips with sticky backs to attach the IR light bar to your monitor. This seemed quite generous until I messed up the palcement of the first strip within seconds - its VERY sticky and difficult to remove without bending. BEFORE you remove the sticky backing tape, carefully place the bar and mark the position with a pencil or wipe off pen to make sure its level and in the right place and properly centred.

2) Make sure the monitor is at an appropriate height / distance
The 4C is actually pretty forgiving interms of set up amd calibration but in some games I noticed the tracking was far more accurate at the bottom of the screen than the top... turned out I was sitting too far away and the monitor was too low. Rasing it up (or angleing the monitor) so the centre was more or less in line with my eye line at right angles made a big difference.

3) If you are a triple monitor user, don't just jump straight in and use Nvidia Surround or AMD eyefinity to make one ultrawide monitor... calibrate and get use to the tech with a single monitor game first!
Tobii don't officially support triple monitors but it does work.. sort of, in some games.. but you lose accuracy the further you get from the central monitor. For some games, this makes for a poor experience whilst others it works ok for extended view provided your eyes dont wander too far past the edges of central monitor. I have 3x24 inch monitors for racing games and sims I would estimate the tracking is usable for the whole of the central monitor and the closest 1/4 to 1/3 of the two side monitors. In games that have integrated extended view (including in games tracking settings) and play nicely with Nvidia surround set ups... F1 2017 being a good example - dial back the extended view a bit from the default and as your eyes look to or just beyond the edges of the central monitor, you still get that VR like effect without it being distracting or shooting off to and extreme viewpoint. Get used to the tech first, experiment with triple monitor games like F1 2017 or Steep later.

4) Make sure the first game you boot up is a good showcase for eye tracking that has been properly integrated into the game!
The support for the 4C in games comes in two forms.. fully integrated and emulated mouse / joystick extensions. It's a bit of a no brainer really but games which have fully integrated the tech tend to work better than those where the eye tracker is used as an emulated mouse! Its great that Tobii are doing their extensions (via the game hub software) but I'e founf them to need a lot of tweaking to feel 'right' - the first game I booted up was Euro Truck Simulator 2 in a triple monitor set up and it was just awful - rather than ehancing the game it made driving the truck much more difficult! After some tweaking it worked a bit better but never felt as if it was working the way it should. By contrast, all of the following games have fully embraced the eye tracking and have in game settings - the difference in terms of gameplay and immersion was HUGE! Here's a list of games I've tried that work REALLY well with the 4C...

F1 2017 (Racing)
Tom Clancy's the Division, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands (Tactical / RPG Shooters)
STEEP (Winter sports ski sim)
Dying Light (Zombie Parour action adventure shooter)
Hunter: Call of the Wild (Hunting sim)
Rise of the Tomb Raider (3rd person action adventure)


I'm currently working my way through about 15 or so supported games but found the extended view, UI and targetting enhancement in those AAA games worked really well.

Hope this is of help to prospective 4C owners.
Vamp