Eye tracking on the International Space Station

These experiments were commenced in the spring 2004 and continued until late 2008 with a series of cosmonauts and astronauts, who each spent six months on board the ISS.

The key question in this experiment is to what extent the orientation of Listing’s plane is altered by the adaptation of the vestibular system to weightlessness, or under gravitational levels less than or greater than those of Earth.

It is currently in use by a group of Russian scientists from the Institute for Biomedical Problems, who are examining eye and head movement coordination in microgravity.

This ensures comprehensive and reliable image processing analysis in the investigators’ lab and minimises the time required for the experiment on the ISS.

In parallel to the space-qualified version of the Eye Tracker a commercially available model has been manufactured by the company Chronos Vision in Berlin and is installed in many laboratories in Europe, North America and Asia, where it represents an essential tool for the examination of numerous neurophysiological phenomena.