Qualisys and Tobii Pro partner to offer combination of motion capture and eye tracking

Qualisys, a leading provider of motion capture technology has partnered with Tobii Pro, the global leader in eye tracking research solutions to integrate the two technologies for combined analysis of eye and body movements. The integration enables research professionals within healthcare, sports and psychology to obtain insights such as the visual strategy behind an athlete’s body movements or a patient’s search pattern – key analytics to improve sports performance, diagnose visual-motor disorders or assess progress in gait rehabilitation.

The resulting data from the motion capture and eye tracking can be streamed in real-time or exported for post analysis. The integration will open up new possibilities within:

• Sports – insights on hand-eye coordination deepen the understanding performance in sports where these skills are crucial such as ball-striking, golf-swing or table tennis. Visual feedback on gaze and motion patterns can be provided to help athletes improve their performance.
  Knowing athletes exact eye and body movements makes it possible to predict where injury may occur and develop methods for prevention.
• Medical – extract tacit knowledge from skilled surgeons and translate their eye-hand coordination to training material. Identify visuomotor disorders and evaluate progress in physical rehabilitation. Biomechanics researchers can learn how eye hand coordination is affected by disease, age or injury. 
• Psychology – understand what visual stimuli triggers body language, explore gesture-speech integration. 

"Tobii Pro and Qualisys are already serving the same customers and we are really excited to now be able to offer this much requested combined analysis of both eye and body movements,” said Tom Englund, president, Tobii Pro. 

In motion capture where eye gaze has been estimated in the past – we can now say with certainty where they were gazing as they ran, walked, tackled and interacted." said Morgan Larsson Software Development Manager Qualisys.

How it works

Eye tracking data is collected through Tobii Pro Glasses 2, a wearable eye tracker with wireless live view function, equipped with a wide-angle HD scene camera, microphone ad and four eye cameras taking up to 100 pictures per second and the Qualisys plug in. Markers that tracks and registers complex sequences of human movement are fitted to the body and onto the eye tracking glasses that translates the movements into an extremely accurate, computer-generated 3D wire-frame model.

The integration then makes it possible to stream data in real time from both technologies into the Qualisys Track Manager (QTM) software. Here the data can be visualized and the eye tracking and gaze vector data can be exported to various other analysis software such as MATLAB.