Written by Beata Lewandowska

Webcam Eye-tracking Hardware and Software Requirements

Find out what kind of equipment you need to use webcam eye-tracking.

TLDR;

PC/Laptop/Mac(Book) with a webcam and Chrome/Edge/Firefox.

This kind of setup provides the best eye-tracking data:

Recommended Participant Hardware and Software:

1080p @ 30FPS or 720p @ 60 FPS webcam, with good quality image.
Updated Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge or Firefox browser.
Updated Windows 11 or macOS X.
4-core Intel processor, 3 GHz or faster, 5th gen. or later.
If using a laptop, then it MUST be plugged into the power cord.
8 GB of RAM with at least 4 GB of memory available (not used).
DirectX 12 graphics card with updated drivers. Integrated Intel Graphics (gen. 5 or later) is fast enough.
Internet connection speed 20 Mbps | 5 Mbps (for live Screen Recording especially, it can be less for image/video testing).

This kind of setup lets collect eye-tracking data but:

The eye-tracking sampling rate may be below 20 Hz, so RealEye Dashboard will not provide any data for fixations.
Accuracy and precision may be significantly lower because of slow face landmark detection.

640x480p @ 15 FPS webcam, with a poor-quality image.
Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, or Safari.
Windows 7/10, macOS X, Linux (i.e., Ubuntu).
At least 0.5 GB of RAM memory is available.
Min. resolution 1024x600 px.
Internet connection speed min. 5 Mbps | 1 Mbps (for Screen Recording tests especially, can be less for image/video testing).

It's recommended to ensure other software does not consume CPU or RAM.
Live websites and hosted sessions usually require a faster CPU than images or video-type studies.
Firefox is highly NOT recommended because it does not support hardware acceleration.