5 Pro Tips to Get Started with Tobii Ghost

Get the most out of streaming with eye tracking.

Marcus Edward Hoy
5 min readJun 12, 2019

It’s been 8 months since the launch of Ghost and we have been learning so much from our community and how they use the Twitch extension. As we keep working on making this product better and as the community keeps growing, we wanted to share a summary of best use cases that we have learned from them so far.

1. More responsiveness = faster tracker.

Experiment with the responsive and size of the tracker for different games.

An intense FPS game has a much faster pace to watch than say a platformer, therefore, it’s important to keep in mind what type of games you are playing and which settings for your eye tracker work best.

There are multiple ways to customize the way the eye tracker moves across your screen.

Turning up the responsiveness will increase the point to point movement of your gaze showing off just how fast your eyes are moving. Combining this with turning the size and the opacity down helps keep the viewer focused on the gameplay but still able to track where you are looking in hectic moments.

Then for slower paced games, try turning the responsiveness down and the size back up.

Really, its all about experimenting and finding out what works best for you. If your viewers don't like what you have set up they can always customize it themselves through the Twitch Extension.

2. Let your viewers know that they are in control.

“What the hell is that bubble flying around your screen?”

You might get a comment or two like this from your viewers when you start out with eye tracking in your streams.

To counteract this we highly recommend onboarding your users about eye tracking. Adding chatbot commands to your stream title, as AleksS does below will show your users how to find out more as well as helping you stick out from the crowd.

Having a chatbot command is super valuable as it saves you having to explain yourself a million times, though talking about it now and again doesn't hurt, either way, it helps to spark up a conversation.

See some examples from daddybravo, AleksS and Talung below.

Messages vary from streamer to streamer — You can even include links with clips/images to make it easier.

When making a chatbot command remember to include in the description what eye tracking does as well as details about how the overlay is customizable and viewers have the option to turn it off. We recommend the following:

“This stream is using Tobii Eye Tracking so you can see where I’m looking. You can customize it to your liking or if you don’t like it you can turn it off by clicking the Tobii/Ghost button on the right top corner of my screen.”

You could go one step further like PanixR6 and make a clip and add that to your chatbot response making it even easier for viewers to understand.

3. No extension? No Problem!

Are you recording a Youtube video with eye tracking or do you want Ghost to be visible on your Twitch clips and VODs?

You can add an eye tracking overlay to OBS by making a game capture layer and selecting the “SSOverlay.exe”. You can read the full set up here.

Make sure to select “Allow Transparency”.

This means that eye tracking will be burnt into your videos, clips or VODs. However, your viewers won't have the option to toggle it on/off or customize it themselves with the extension (when streaming).

What you can do though, is set up a hotkey in the Ghost software to toggle it on or off from your side — meaning you can turn it on just for those exciting gameplay moments or when you want to make a Twitch Clip to show off eye tracking.

Also, notice that the Twitch Extension is only available in the following browsers (Firefox and Mobile coming soon).

4. Tobii Ghost on every game.

The best thing with Tobii Ghost is that you can apply an eye tracking overlay to any game you’re streaming, from any platform.

However, you will need to be streaming through a PC via a capture card or something like PS4 remote play to your PC (which works pretty well too). Then just set it all up in OBS as usual.

Check out Wumbotize absolutely dominating in Tetris 99 with eye tracking on to show his viewers how he plays.

Note: He is using the overlay in OBS for Youtube videos.

Also, a really helpful article for any streamer taking on eye tracking is “Streaming with two computers using Tobii Ghost” which you can read here.

5. Let us know when you are live.

We are always looking for new and creative ways of using eye tracking for streaming, so dont forget to mention us when you are live so we can come to take some clips to showcase cool usage on our social media.

If you want to get more insights from some of the streamers who use eye tracking you can read more here.

Also, make sure to connect with us on social media and Discord to join our community of eye tracking users.

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Marcus Edward Hoy

Passionate geek fuelled by all sorts of interests; reading, gaming, movies, TV, and much more. Previously Community Manager at Stryda and Tobii AB (Gaming)