virtualbox.org

Hardware: MacBook air mid 2012
Host: El Capitan
Guest: Windows 10

I'm trying to use a specific piece of USB hardware (Tobii EyeX). It's giving frequent disconnects.

I have posted on their forum: http://developer.tobii.com/community/fo ... box-guest/ and a technical support staff has linked http://www.tobii.com/xperience/support/ ... ontroller/ but that appears to be for Windows 8 ... Is it still relevant?

I'm thinking that maybe my Guest is using some Standard USB3 Driver, and maybe it is possible to get a driver for my exact hardware.

Is this possible? Can anyone help me make some headway?

π

Ohmu wrote:I'm thinking that maybe my Guest is using some Standard USB3 Driver, and maybe it is possible to get a driver for my exact hardware.

What do you suppose is your "exact hardware"? You don't actually have "exact" hardware in a VM, you have "virtual" hardware. And your guest has already installed the appropriate drivers, if you're accessing the hardware.

The fact that your USB device gets disconnected has nothing to do with the driver and everything to do with (picky) hardware latency between your device and the (emulated) controller. Having access to a particular piece of hardware does not mean that it will work as nature intended™.

Why do you think that there is a category called USB devices and another one called Webcams? Because of the difficulties in the USB implementation, they had to "invent" the webcams.

socratis wrote:Why do you think that there is a category called USB devices and another one called Webcams? Because of the difficulties in the USB implementation, they had to "invent" the webcams.

That... plus not every webcam is a USB device.

To quote myself from an earlier Ohmu post…

loukingjr wrote:I gather from this post and the user's other post that the objective is to utilize the Tobil eyetracker, which is basically a game controller, running in a Windows guest, which then somehow will pass information back to a Steam game running on the OSX host so the game can use that information. I can easily think of reasons why this won't work.

You would have a better chance running a physical Windows machine and doing the same thing. Even then I doubt it would work.

Good Luck though.

Ohmu, maybe you should just ask the Tobil folks to develop an OSX version.

Yes, I'm starting to really suspect it is some latency issue.

Someone else has succeeded using VMWare Fusion on a MacBook Pro -- that's why I haven't given up yet.

I'm going to try myself using VMWare Fusion, just in case it performs better than VirtualBox for USB.

Using a separate Windows machine is a possibility, but very ugly: I really don't want to do that! I will end up with a rats nest of wires and whirring boxes, I want to remain portable. I have complained bitterly to Tobii regarding their Business decision to ignore non-Windows platforms.

π

FWIW, Fusion being a commercial product, handles certain things differently and according to a VMWare Tech Support person I spoke with, they and Parallels pay for certain access to API code which may or may not be true. I don't really trust tech support people.

I do know the graphics work differently. I own Fusion for OSX guests.

None have 3D acceleration for OSX guests. (grumbling).