Student's Bio
Sunnie Qu is a Senior double majoring in Computer Science and Economics. In the summer of 2021, she worked with Professor Nilanjan Sarkar in the Vanderbilt Robotics and Autonomous Systems Laboratory to design and test a lost-cost eye tracking system for human-computer interactions. Now-days, researchers use professional eye-trackers like Tobii EyeX for gaze tracking tasks. However, professional eye-trackers have the disadvantages of being expensive and the price can be as high as thousands of dollars. Professional eye-trackers sometimes also require the users to have technology backgrounds in order to collect data correctly, and the lab has to ship the device to remote users which is inconvenient and inefficient.
In this research, Sunnie developed an eye tracker that uses the webcams already present on laptops and developed the necessary software to extract gaze information in real-
time. Such a system would be both economical and portable, making the existing computer-based eye-tracking remote research accessible to a larger population.
time. Such a system would be both economical and portable, making the existing computer-based eye-tracking remote research accessible to a larger population.