Eyelink
About EyeLink
The Eyelink series of eye trackers, produced by SR Research, are one of the most commonly used eye trackers in psychological research. SR Research provides Python bindings for the Eyelink (called PyLink), which are used by PyGaze. The license of PyLink is incompatible with the license used by OpenSesame. For that reason, PyLink is not included in the default distribution of OpenSesame, and needs to be installed separately.
SR Research forum
You will need to download some software from the SR Research forum. This is a closed forum, but you can register free of charge.
Windows
Installing the EyeLink display software
The Eyelink display software provides the libraries that are required to communicate with the Eyelink PC. You can find it here:
If you extract the .zip, and then run the .exe installer, the EyeLink display will be installed in one of the following folders (depending on your version of Windows:
C:\Program Files\SR Research\EyeLink\
C:\Program Files (x86)\SR Research\EyeLink
In this folder, there is a libs subfolder, which you need to add to the system Path (this may have been added to the path automatically, but check to make sure). You can do this by opening "My Computer", clicking on "View system information", opening the "Advanced" tab, clicking on "Environment Variables" and appending ;C:\Program Files\SR Research\EyeLink\libs or (depending on your system) ;C:\Program Files (x86)\SR Research\EyeLink\libs to the Path variable (under System variables).
Installing PyLink
PyLink is the Python library for EyeLink support. PyLink is included with recent versions of the EyeLink display software (described above), and you can find it in one of the following folders (depending on your version of Windows):
C:\Program Files\SR Research\EyeLink\SampleExperiments\Python
C:\Program Files (x86)\SR Research\EyeLink\SampleExperiments\Python
Alternatively, you can download older versions of Pylink from here:
To install PyLink in OpenSesame, simply copy the folder with the correct PyLink version to the OpenSesame program folder (i.e. pylink27 for Python 2.7) and rename the folder to pylink (i.e. strip the Python version number from the folder name).
Ubuntu
The EyeLink display software can be installed directly from a repository. This also installs PyLink and various convenient tools, such ast the edf2asc converter.
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://download.sr-support.com/software SRResearch main"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install eyelink-display-software
For more information, please visit:
PyGaze
After you have install the EyeLink display software and PyLink per the instructions above, you can use the EyeLink with PyGaze! See:
What happened to the EyeLink plugins?
The OpenSesame EyeLink plugins have been deprecated in favor of PyGaze. However, even though the EyeLink plugins are no longer maintained, they still work. For more information, visit the older version of this documentation page: