GazeRecorder vs iTrace

GazeRecorder uses a webcam to track eye movement and create video recordings for remote UX research on desktop and mobile. Its online service can test live websites, images, screenshots, mockups, pictures, videos and apps. The maker says it can show where participants look and for how long in real time. GazeFlow generates heatmaps over webpages, applications, static images or videos, and can combine data from multiple subjects. Desktop features include real-time webcam tracking, one-click experiment creation and dynamic heatmaps. The desktop version requires a webcam, but specialized hardware is not required; smartphone tracking uses the selfie camera. Visualizations include heatmaps, gaze paths, fixation metrics and areas of interest, with video recordings and session data available for export. The maker says respondent-level eye and click data can be provided along with aggregated sample data. The free desktop version is for non-commercial use. The FAQ gives approximate GazeCloud API accuracy of 1.0 degree and precision of 0.2 degree of visual angle. Listed platforms include web, Windows, iOS, Android and API.

iTrace is a free, MIT-licensed toolkit for analyzing webcam eye-tracking data, with a scientific core built on NumPy and SciPy. It computes gaze in degrees of visual angle and detects fixations, saccades, and microsaccades using I-VT, I-DT, and Engbert–Kliegl methods. Pupil tools include blink detection and interpolation, preprocessing, and eye-crop segmentation measured in pixels or relative to iris size. Affine screen-space calibration reports calibration error and gaze-quality measures. The command-line tool analyzes gaze CSV files and exports JSON reports. Optional webcam capture uses OpenCV and MediaPipe, and optional interfaces include a local HTML app using FastAPI and WebSockets and a Streamlit dashboard. Live workflows can export derived gaze, pupil, and capture CSVs. By default, the workflow does not save raw eye video or persisted eye-crop images, though live viewing may send a temporary JPEG crop to a browser over a local WebSocket. The project says its checks use synthetic ground truth rather than real eye-tracking data or a reference device. Webcam pupil size is a relative proxy, not a measurement in millimetres.