BeGaze
BeGaze is the analysis program that comes with our SMI eye trackers.
Eye-tracking data collected using the iView X software will be saved as a .idf file. This is a proprietary SMI file format which must currently be opened using the BeGaze analysis software (until someone figures out a workaround). Once loaded in BeGaze however, raw data can be exported in more common file formats if desired.
Loading .idf files into BeGaze is straightforward if you will use SMI's Experiment Centre for stimulus presentation. If however you plan to use E-prime, Matlab, etc, and you will be sending text strings to signal trials/events to the Eye Tracking computer via serial port or ethernet(i.e. 'ET_REM blank.bmp'), it becomes more cumbersome. Full codes for using eyetracking with matlab and eprime can be found on the main eyetracking wiki. If you are presenting a series of images, BeGaze will automatically create associations between the images and eye-tracking data if you send the name of the image file in the text string. Otherwise you will have to create the association between each trial and stimulus manually, which could be quite time-consuming depending on the number of trials in your experiment!
The unit now has a license to use the video analysis package add on for BeGaze which enables you to analyse experiments that use video stimuli and play your videos with the gaze data overlayed.This should work with all the dongles at the unit and requires at least Experiment Center version 2.1 or higher. It is important to make sure the videos are in an accepted format (avi, wmv, asf, mpg,mpeg, mpe, vob, mp4, m4v or mkv)and not larger than 1080p. Before use in BeGaze the videos need to be optimised in Experiment Center which is easily done using the 'movie' button to load the video. When you load the video into Experiment Center it will automatically optimise it and save it in the location C:\program files\SMI\experimentsuite\experimentcenter\tmp so there is no need to save it when you exit the program.
Common Problems
There has been a small glitch in the latest version of BeGaze (3.3.56) when playing video files, that the video loads into an experiment but doesn't play, so that the gaze data is just overlayed onto a static image. There is a relatively simple fix for this, you will need SQLite Database Browser which can be downloaded from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sqlitebrowser/
When you are in this application, follow these instructions:
1. Using the open database button navigate to the folder in faces where the experiments are stored
2. Open the experiment you want to fix
3. Open the experiment.sql file
4. Click on the browse data tab and from the table menu choose Stimuli Extra
5. In the first line of the table in the I1 box change the number from 6 to 4 by double clicking on it
6. Make sure you apply the changes and click save in the application before you close it. Experiment should now work!