Tobii Launches the Tobii Research Community: A Curated Open-Source Hub for Eye Tracking Tools

Tobii has launched the Tobii Research Community on GitHub, a community-driven catalogue of open-source tools, scripts, SDK extensions and integrations compatible with Tobii Pro eye trackers. The repository is live at github.com/tobii/research-community.

Jon Ward of Tobii announced the launch and gave the rationale plainly: eye tracking is now used across so many different fields that no single platform can meet every need. The repository is a place to share the tools and workarounds researchers build to fill those gaps.

Why a Community Repository

Eye tracking has expanded well beyond its original niche in psychology and human factors. Today researchers use it in cognitive neuroscience, sports science, education, clinical assessment, market research, software engineering studies and more. Each field has its own quirks. Stimulus presentation requirements, data export formats, integration with EEG or motion capture, specialized analysis pipelines. Over the years individual labs have built and shared a large amount of open-source software to handle them.

The problem was discoverability. Useful tools sat scattered across personal GitHub accounts, lab websites and old forum posts. A new postdoc joining an eye-tracking lab might spend weeks hunting down the right pupillometry package or the right LSL connector before getting to the science. The Tobii Research Community repository pulls all of this into one place.

What's in the Catalogue

The repository is organized by workflow stage, so researchers can jump directly to the part of the pipeline they need help with:

• Experiment design and data collection: stimulus presentation and experiment control tools including PsychoPy, Psychtoolbox, OpenSesame, PyGaze, Titta, Opticka, and the Presentation Tobii Pro Extension.
• Data access, parsing and management: official SDKs for Tobii Pro and Tobii Pro Glasses 3, plus community tools like glassesTools and EyePort for working with Glasses 3 recordings.
• Analysis, visualization and quality: pupillometry (CHAP, PupillometryR, pypillometry, PupEyes, PupilMetrics), event detection (NH2010, SaFiDe, PeyeMMV), AOI and scanpath analysis (gazeR, kollaR, scanpath), validation (GlassesValidator), and full analysis pipelines (PyMovements, tobii-eye-tracking-pipeline, EyeFeatures).
• Integration and synchronization: LSL connectors, the EYE-EEG toolbox for combined EEG and gaze analysis, and Titta's LSL streamer for synchronizing Tobii data with other modalities.
• Wearable and egocentric workflows: GazeMapper, GlassesViewer, Mobile Gaze Mapping, and Python controllers for Tobii Pro Glasses devices.
• Utilities, examples and SDK resources: smaller helpers like EyeLiveMetrics for real-time browser-based gaze metrics.

Each entry is tagged by device compatibility (screen-based, wearable, or both) and carries a short description of what the tool does, so researchers can judge fit before clicking through.

A Structured, Contribution-Friendly Resource

Alongside the human-readable README tables, the underlying data lives in a structured CSV (data/catalogue.csv) with a defined schema. That makes the catalogue programmatically queryable and extensible. Contributors update the CSV, then the README is regenerated from it. It is the kind of detail that says the repository was built to scale rather than rot.

The repository is licensed under MIT and includes a CONTRIBUTING.md guide. Tobii is inviting researchers and developers to contribute their own tools, enhancements or use cases. Tobii's stated goal is a collaborative environment that the whole research community builds and benefits from.

What This Means for Eye-Tracking Researchers

For labs already running Tobii hardware, this is the place to start any new project. Instead of searching through papers and stale links, researchers can browse a categorized catalogue of tools already checked for compatibility with Tobii Pro devices and software.

For the wider eye-tracking community it sets a precedent. A vendor-run open-source catalogue with structured data and an open contribution model makes it easier for new researchers to get productive, and it cuts the duplicated effort that comes from everyone solving the same data parsing or LSL synchronization problem in isolation.

Researchers working with Tobii Pro Spectrum, Tobii Pro Fusion, Tobii Pro Glasses 3 or any other Tobii Pro device can explore the full catalogue and contribute their own tools at github.com/tobii/research-community.