Tobii is a Swedish high-technology company that develops and sells products for eye control and eye tracking.
History
, Mårten Skogö and Henrik Eskilsson founded the company in 2001. All three founders play an active role in the company: Henrik Eskilsson is the CEO, John Elvesjö is vice president and CTO, and Mårten Skogö is Chief Science Officer. The Tobii Group consists of three business units: Tobii Dynavox from an acquisition of US based DynaVox, Tobii Pro, and Tobii Tech. Tobii is based in Stockholm, Sweden, with offices in the US, Japan, China, Germany, Norway and Ukraine. Tobii became publicly traded on April 22, 2015, trading on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. In 2007, the company got $14 million in venture capital from Investor Growth Capital. In May 2009, Investor, Amadeus Capital Partners and Northzone Ventures invested an additional $16 million, and at the start of 2012, Intel Capital invested $21 million. In 2008, Tobii won the Swedish Grand Award of Design together with the design company Myra Industriell Design, for the technology and design in their eye controlled screens. In 2010, Tobii won the SIME Grand Prize for having the most innovative technology concept. In 2011, Tobii Glasses won the red dot design award, an international product design competition and later the same year, Tobii won the Bully Award. In 2012, Tobii took home the award for best prototype at the consumer technology tradeshow 2012 CES and Laptop Magazine named Tobii the winner in its best new technology category.
Products
Tobii's products are sold directly and through resellers and partners worldwide. People with communication disabilities use Tobii Dynavox's technical devices and language tools to communicate. Due to their high cost, they are often the goal of charity drives. Tobii Pro has products that are widely used for research in the academic community, and to conduct usability studies and market surveys of commercial products. Tobii Tech is the business unit that partners with others to integrate eye tracking and eye control in different industry applications and fields such as advanced driver assistance, consumer computing and gaming. At the Consumer Electronics Show 2012, they demonstrated the Tobii Gaze, an infrared light based eye tracking device that makes it possible for users to use their eyes to point and interact with a standard computer. In 2014, Tobii partnered with Danish SteelSeries and launched their first eye tracking system for consumers: the Tobii EyeX and the SteelSeries Sentry Eye Tracker. Several video games from major publishers were released in 2015-16 with support for Tobii's consumer devices, with varying levels of success.
