The Initiators

OpenET is initiated by Shreshth Saxena and Dr. Lauren Fink from BEATLab at McMaster University, Canada. It builds on their years of experience designing and conducting laboratory and remote eye-tracking studies using desktop, mobile, and webcam-based systems. The initiative emerged from both thier own research challenges and ongoing conversations with researchers, developers, and practitioners across the eye-tracking community at venues such as ACM ETRA, SIGCHI, ECEM, VSS, and ECVP.

The public release of OpenET will take place with an accepted presentation at HCII 2026 in Montreal, Canada. We are looking forward to introduce the initiative to the wider research community, start new conversations, and invite researchers, developers, and practitioners to help shape OpenET as it grows.

Acknowledgements

The work for OpenET has been made possible through support from McMaster University's Faculty of Science Pre-Seed Funding, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2023-05050), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) John R. Evans Leaders Fund (Project #43884), and the Ontario Research Fund – Small Infrastructure Fund (Project #43884). We are grateful for this support.