harplab / gazetracking

Eye gaze tracking using Pupil Labs head-mounted tracker.

gazetracking

Eye gaze tracking using Pupil Labs head-mounted tracker.

Publishing gaze positions with ROS

Start Pupil Capture. Ensure that the Pupil Remote plugin is running (available in Pupil Capture under "General" -> "Open plugin").

Ensure that the Pupil Remote IP and port are set to match the values in pupil_listener.py (usually tcp://127.0.0.1:50020).

Run the pupil listener:

rosrun gazetracking pupil_listener.py

This should publish information on two ROS topics: pupil_info and gaze_info. The gaze_info topic contains a subset of the information from pupil_info that is most commonly used, specifically the position of the gaze (norm_pos) and the confidence value (confidence).

For more information about the data contained in pupil_info, see the Pupil Capture website here: https://github.com/pupil-labs/pupil/wiki/Data-Format.

Synchronizing time with ROS

Installation

In addition to standard package installable via pip, you'll need to install pyre:

pip install git+https://github.com/zeromq/pyre

Running the service

In a terminal, after sourcing ros, run

rosrun gazetracking ros_pupil_time_sync.py

Then, in Pupil Capture, enable the plugin Time Sync. It should show some debug messages, and the ros window should show a message like

"<hostname>" joined "default-time_sync-v1" group. Announcing service.

To test the time synchronization, you can use the utility get_pupil_time.py in this package. It should print the current ROS time and the current Pupil Capture time. If they are not identical, something's not set up correctly.

Note that due to a fundamental Python issue, ros_pupil_time_sync.py is not interruptible with Ctrl-C. If you want to quit it, kill it from another thread with kill -9 PID. The following absurd bash command will scrape ps for the right process and kill it for you:

kill -9 $(ps a | grep ros_pupil_time_sync | head -1 | tr -s " " | cut -d " " -f 1)