My first piece of flight sim hardware, interestingly enough, was not a flight stick or yoke. Nor was it a throttle, or pedals. In fact, my first piece of flight sim hard wasn’t even necessarily flight simulation hardware. My first piece of flight sim hardware was a TrackIR 5, that I was using in games such as Arma to look around and get more situational awareness. I was still only using flight simulators casually, and happy to fly with my mouse and keyboard before I got more serious about flight simulation.
While being able to move your head around in the simulator is not for everyone, I personally feel it offers a sense of immersion that is quite fundamental to my flight sim experience. It’s a good way to look around at the world below you when you’re flying VFR, helps you get situational awareness at busy airports in your commercial aircraft and it makes flying in formation so much easier when I’m flying around with friends (or strangers).
But my TrackIR 5 is nearly fifteen years old now. And while the camera unit is still holding up really well, the standard TrackClip doesn’t fit on my headset, I don’t think wearing a cap is comfortable, and the TrackClip Pro I have is hanging on by a literal thread. So, I went looking for an alternative and luckily, the Tobii team was kind enough to send me a review unit of their Tobii Eye Tracker.
Installation and Setup
The Tobii Eye Tracker 5 comes in a long box that contains two different monitor mounts as well as a cable to connect it to your PC. There are clear instructions on how to attach the unit to your monitor, but it’s still good to pay attention here, as there are differences in where and how to mount the unit based on whether or not you have a curved monitor. The mount is attached to your monitor with some adhesive, while the eye tracker itself is easily attached with two magnetic strips. The eye tracking unit itself has a cable coming out on the right side, which you need to attach to your computer. This cable is a bit short, though the box also contains a cable extension.
After the physical installation, Windows offered to install the drivers with the Tobii ‘Experience Hub’ automatically. After installing the driver, the Experience Hub opens and you can begin calibrating the Tobii Eye Tracker to your eyes. This is fairly easy, as you just need to follow some dots on the screen. The calibration process takes less than a minute, and after that, I was ready to start using the Tobii Eye Tracker.
Now I want to take a quick moment here and highlight how easy, simple and straight-forward this whole experience was, from unboxing to using it. The box of the Tobii contains the essentials that you need for it, and not much else. Attaching it to your monitor is simple, straight-forward and easy. The part of the process that took the most amount of time, for me, was pushing the cable through the already crowded cable gutter of my monitor, so that is entirely on me. You can be ready to use your unit in about five to ten minutes. I was super impressed by the easy experience. On top of that, the unit itself has a sleek design. The long bar fits comfortably underneath your monitor, and does not stand out like an eyesore like a more conventional webcam, or my TrackIR camera unit. In fact, the Tobii Eye Tracker fits under my screen so well that more often than not I forget that it’s there.
There is one drawback to me, and that is that you need to download and install additional tools if you want to utilise more functions of your Tobii Eye Tracker. You need to download a separate ‘Game Hub’, if you want to set up the Tobii Eye Tracker for certain games. There is also an additional ‘Ghost’ module that you need to download and install if you want a ‘ghost’ of where you’re looking visible on the screen (this is handy for demonstration purposes as you’ll see later). While this allows you to only use the tools that you want, I personally don’t understand why this hasn’t just been bundled into one tool that allows you to use the unit to its fullest extent right from the start.
Experience in MSFS
After the installation and setup process, I booted up my simulator to start using the Tobii Eye Tracker. No additional setup is required for MSFS after the initial driver installation, so I figured I was good to go. I booted up the simulator, chose my plane and once in the sim itself, my viewpoint was located somewhere behind the seat that the captain normally sits in. It took me a short moment to figure this out, but you’re going to want to assign the ‘Eye Tracking Reset’ function to something on your hardware. Once this initial hurdle was dealt with, before I went into the separate calibration settings for MSFS, I looked around the cockpit using my eyes. This may sound strange to you as a reader, but using the Tobii Eye Tracker for the first few times will take some getting used to. Where TrackIR normally follows the position of my head, Tobii follows your eyes. This distinction is important.
As soon as my eyes started panning around, so too did the camera perspective of MSFS. After moving my eyes the camera followed decently fast, although I could not quite shake the feeling of some lag. There is a small but noticeable input delay and it can become a bit bothersome. I started up my plane, which, while it was a simple plane to start, still proved to be a bit challenging due to me needing to get used to the eye tracker. Again, although it sounds quite silly when writing this, you need to look at the control you’re interacting with. You can’t try to interact with a control and quickly glance at something else, because the eye tracker (with its default calibration) will follow your eyes and pan the camera around. Until using the Tobii Eye Tracker I never realised the amount of looking around I do in a cockpit while interacting with other buttons and controls.
Admittedly, while part of it certainly had to do with me needing to get used to using the unit, it was also a bit of a factor that turned me off from it. This became more noticeable during my flight. I was flying around the Washington area, trying to recognise the landmarks and taking in the improved photogrammetry from Microsoft’s latest City Update. While looking out the window at recognizable landmarks such as The White House or the Washington Monument, I tried to keep an eye on my instruments and gauges. This meant that every time I did so, the camera would quickly pan over to these instruments. If you do that often enough, it creates a bit of an annoying effect where the camera is constantly making small adjustments to where your eyes are at. It also makes taking quick glances at your instruments a bit difficult, which is not helped by the input lag from the Tobii Eye Tracker.
Luckily, a lot of the Tobii Eye Tracker’s sensitivity settings can be tweaked in the MSFS settings pages. You can adjust the sensitivity for eye tracking versus head tracking (which Tobii also does, albeit far less accurate than its Eye Tracking feature). You can also change centering and softening effects here, as well as make translation adjustments. While I appreciate the different customisation options, admittedly, I never really found a setting that worked well for me when it comes to the eye tracking. Turning the sensitivity down worked great when looking at instruments, but this made the camera not sensitive enough for when I was finally flying and wanted to look around. Similarly, adjusting the camera so that looking around during the flight felt good, meant the camera kept jumping around when entering flight plan data. You can’t imagine the pain when trying to set up a flight and the camera constantly makes micro-adjustments as you look at different keys on an FMC. In the end, I had to opt for one or the other: either use the eye tracker while flying, or while setting up the plane, doing the cockpit preparation and getting ready to fly. It’s a trade-off that I wish I didn’t have to make.
Eventually I found another setting that worked for me. It worked for both cockpit preparation, as well as flying, but it’s not the setting I had wanted to use. The solution to my problem was to disable eye tracking altogether, and only use head tracking. Although this works well enough, it does not always work great. You lose some accuracy, and the eye tracker struggles with depth perception, meaning you sometimes lose out on a 6 DOF experience because the unit can’t pick up your movements well enough. At the same time, you still get the small camera corrections that you get with the eye tracking feature turned on, but to a lesser extent. It still frequently causes you to click the wrong button in your cockpit though. Basically, the unit became easier and better to use by disabling the one feature that makes it so unique in the first place. I feel like using it this way is not the intended purpose of the Tobii Eye Tracker, but it’s the one way I personally felt the unit was somewhat usable during all phases of the flight. I have understood from other people that they only use the eye tracker during certain phases of flight; some of them use it purely when taxiing around for that additional situational awareness, where others say they use it almost exclusively in flight, mostly VFR, to take in the scenery around them. I’d say that either of those approaches sound like very viable use cases for the eye tracker, but a one-stop solution it is not.
Conclusion
I really wanted to like the Tobii Eye Tracker. Even more so, I really wanted it to replace my TrackIR 5. The hardware unit itself has a sleek and discreet look, and it’s easy to install to your monitor. The software itself, despite small drawbacks, is easy to install as well. It integrates seamlessly into Microsoft Flight Simulator, and after setting up the sensitivity it should be one of those devices you simply turn on and forget about. Unfortunately, in practice, the Tobii Eye Tracker doesn’t quite work like that. The eye tracking itself is a bit irritating to use as your eyes glance across your instruments. It causes the camera to constantly jump around. That would be irritating enough by itself, but it’s made worse by the fact that there is a noticeable input lag, and if you’re at a performance unfriendly airport, the camera movement is even more slow and sluggish. In the end, I settled on a solution that didn’t use eye tracking at all, and instead just used head tracking. Even then, it worked with flaws. The Tobii Eye Tracker 5 is not a cheap unit, and I feel like putting down so much money on a device with a considerable amount of drawbacks might not be quite worth it compared to other solutions.
