OpenSesame Plugin: Titta Eye Tracking

An OpenSesame plugin for Tobii eye trackers through Titta: calibration, recording, messages and gaze plotting.

Copyright (C) 2023-2026 Bob Rosbag, Diederick C. Niehorster & Marcus Nyström

About

This plugin makes Titta available in OpenSesame, for experiments with Tobii eye trackers.

Titta is a toolbox for using eye trackers from Tobii Pro AB with Python, specifically offering integration with PsychoPy. A Matlab version that integrates with PsychToolbox is also available from https://github.com/dcnieho/Titta. For a similar toolbox for SMI eye trackers, please see https://github.com/marcus-nystrom/SMITE.

Cite as: Niehorster, D.C., Andersson, R. & Nystrom, M. (2020). Titta: A toolbox for creating PsychToolbox and Psychopy experiments with Tobii eye trackers. Behavior Research Methods. doi: 10.3758/s13428-020-01358-8

Please mention: Bob Rosbag as creator of this plugin

For questions, bug reports or to check for updates on Titta, please visit https://github.com/marcus-nystrom/Titta. For the plugin, please visit https://github.com/dev-jam/opensesame-plugin-titta_eyetracking.

To minimize the risk of missing samples, Titta uses TittaPy, a C++ wrapper around the Tobii SDK, to pull samples made available from the eye tracker. TittaPy is installed together with Titta.

Items

• Titta Init connects to the eye tracker and sets it up: the eye tracker model, dummy mode, calibration settings and an optional operator screen. Place it at the beginning of the experiment.
• Titta Calibrate shows Titta's calibration screen.
• Titta Start Recording starts the recording of the chosen data (gaze, time sync, eye images, notifications, external signal, positioning).
• Titta Send Message sends a message to the recording, e.g. to mark an event.
• Titta Plot Gaze shows the gaze position on the stimulus display and/or the operator display, until a response key is pressed or the timeout has passed.
• Titta Stop Recording stops the recording.
• Titta Save Data saves the recording as subject-<nr>.h5 in the folder of the log file (subject-<nr>_1.h5, ... when that file exists), and can also export it to tsv files. In dummy mode no data is saved.

Requirements

• OpenSesame 4.0 or 4.1 with the PsychoPy backend; the items are hidden for other backends.
• Titta 2.2.2 or newer (installed with the plugin).
• PsychoPy, which comes with OpenSesame (it is not installed with the plugin).

Installation

Install the plugin with pip, in the Python environment of OpenSesame:

pip install opensesame-plugin-titta-eyetracking

License

This plugin is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version (GPL-3.0-or-later).

The full license text is in the file COPYING, and is also available at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html.

This plugin contains works of others.

Notes

• One recording per experiment is working properly. Per trial recording (multiple starts and stops within an experiment) has not yet been tested.