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 curated, community-driven catalogue of open-source tools, scripts, SDK extensions, and integrations compatible with Tobii Pro eye trackers. The repository is now live at github.com/tobii/research-community.

The launch was announced by Jon Ward of Tobii, who framed the rationale clearly: with eye tracking now used across so many different fields, no single platform can meet every need. The repository is a place to share the tools and workarounds that researchers actually 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 — and over the years, individual labs have built and shared a remarkable amount of open-source software to handle them.

The problem was discoverability. Useful tools were 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 actual science. The Tobii Research Community repository pulls all of this into one place.

What's in the Catalogue

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

• Experiment Design & Data Collection — stimulus presentation and experiment control tools including PsychoPy, Psychtoolbox, OpenSesame, PyGaze, Titta, Opticka, and the Presentation Tobii Pro Extension.
• Data Access, Parsing & 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 & Quality — a deep selection covering 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 & Synchronization — LSL connectors, the EYE-EEG toolbox for combined EEG + gaze analysis, and Titta's LSL streamer for synchronizing Tobii data with other modalities.
• Wearable & Egocentric Workflows — GazeMapper, GlassesViewer, Mobile Gaze Mapping, and Python controllers for Tobii Pro Glasses devices.
• Utilities, Examples & 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 includes a short description of what the tool actually does, so researchers can quickly assess fit before clicking through.

A Structured, Contribution-Friendly Resource

One of the better design decisions in the repo: 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 first, then the README is regenerated. This is the kind of detail that signals the repo is intended to scale rather than rot.

The repository is licensed under MIT and includes a CONTRIBUTING.md guide. Tobii is actively inviting researchers and developers to contribute their own tools, enhancements, or use cases. As Tobii's announcement put it, the goal is a collaborative environment that benefits the entire research community — not just a top-down list curated by the vendor.

What This Means for Eye-Tracking Researchers

For labs already using Tobii hardware, this is a useful new starting point for any project. Instead of searching through papers and stale links, researchers can browse a curated, categorized catalogue of tools that have been vetted for compatibility with Tobii Pro devices and software.

For the broader eye-tracking community, it sets a useful precedent. Vendor-curated open-source catalogues — done well, with structured data and an open contribution model — make it dramatically easier for new researchers to get productive, and they reduce 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 consider contributing their own tools at github.com/tobii/research-community.