UnitEye: Introducing a User-Friendly Plugin to Democratize Eye Tracking Technology in Unity Environments

Eye tracking is a powerful tool for analyzing visual attention, as an input technique, or for diagnosing disorders. However, eye tracking hardware is expensive and not accessible to everyone, thus, considerably limiting real-world usage or at-home evaluations. Although webcam-based eye tracking is feasible due to advances in computer vision, its open-source implementation as an easy-to-use tool is lacking. We implemented UnitEye, a Unity plugin enabling eye tracking on desktop and laptop computers. In a technical evaluation (N=12), we tested the precision and accuracy of our system compared to a state-of-the-art eye tracker. We also evaluated the usability of UnitEye with N=5 developers. The results confirm that our system provides reliable eye tracking performance for a webcam-based system and well-integrated features contributing to ease of use.