At the recent 2012 CES in Las Vegas, all eyes were on the eye control wizardry of Swedish company Tobii. The new assistive technology application watches laptop user’s eyes to allow their eye movements to control their computers. Call it eye control or gaze control, the incredibly cool feature is available on the Windows 8 OS.
Tobii’s North American GM, Barbara Barclay presented a paper about it at the D9 conference last June and made waves with a few skeptics wondering if it will ever take off. Eyes are used to see and not control. With a big difference between looking on the screen and controlling what happens next, the gaze control technology creates a new paradigm in the way people use their computers.
Barclay was at the CES and joined by Anders Olsson who demonstrated how the Tobii eye tracking solution works. To launch a file, for instance, you press on a Windows key, look at the title of the file or app and then release the key. This key press precludes the risk of your computer going off when your gaze wanders off. In terms of effort and speed, it’s always easier to look at the screen than having your mouse move the cursor over any title and then clicking to get it launched. That makes gaze control a viable option.
The enabling technology comes from Windows 8 which drives a combination of touch and eyesight interfaces as well as new hardware with two special IR cameras. It utilized a custom-built HP laptop and works by firing near-infrared lights to your eyes using the two IR cameras to capture “the reflective point of retina plus the glint off the cornea,” according to the demo. This creates an internal 3D model of your eye to serve as input awareness of where on the screen your eyes are looking and provides the reactive feedback. But that won’t do anything until you release the required key press.
It actually works quite well. Your glances just became a working input signal. Because the software requires specially built laptops, expects the first commercial batch to carry a hefty price tag. It will be recalled that touchscreens carried a $300 average premium when it first came out.
