The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Foundation is a center for research in vision and oculomotility, currently awarded $3.2M in PHS grants (recommended and committed). These grants fund studies of eye movements in humans and monkeys, and studies of human vision that could be improved or extended with eye movement monitoring. However, except for a scleral search coil system (the coil is only wearable for short periods, requires an available physician, and is not tolerated by some subjects), our Foundation has no facilities for accurate 2-dimensional recording of human eye move- ments. Indeed, apart from the Purkinje-image Eyetracker, no non- contacting 2-D eye position recording method with reasonable spatial and temporal resolution is available. The Eyetracker Experimental Station would provide a centralized facility for 2-dimensional, binocular human eye position monitoring, eye-position-contingent display generation, and data collection, analysis, storage, and distribution. The monitoring, computation, and display system would have 1 min arc spatial resolution and 1 msec synchronous temporal resolution over a 24 deg by 24 deg binocular field. Powerful data analysis would be supported, as well as data transmission to other systems. The system would consist of: an SRI binocular Double Purkinje-image Eyetracker; high resolution, fast phospher, vector display scopes; a Masscomp MC-5500 multiprocessor lab computer with RTR experiment control software (both supplied by SKERF); a Masscomp graphics terminal with data analysis and display software; Ethernet links to three remote systems. Projects scheduled to use the system include: eye movements and velocity discrimination; vergence and conjunctive search; visual motion processing and smooth pursuit; pursuit plasticity; naso- temporal asymmetries in motion processing; nystagmus and contrast sensitivity; convergence and stereo matching; binocular saccadic plasticity.
