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Eye-based Navigation Research From IBM
leviramsey writes: "The Jakarta Post (through Lexis-Nexis) has an article on MAGIC, an eye-tracking component of BlueEyes, a project to add greater sensory abilities to computers IBM's Almaden Research Center. Oddly enough IBM's site has very little on MAGIC under that name, though a reference is made to PupilFinder which seems to be the technology underlying MAGIC. The article speculates about possible applications, including in cars (gulp!) and goes into detail on other components of the project, several of which are very interesting."
What about roadside distractions, though? One of the busier roads in my part of town is popular with joggers. Especially female joggers. Good-looking female joggers. I don't want the car to do something it shouldn't because my gaze lingers lustfully off of the road for a couple of seconds.
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I've a squint in both the eyes..Hope they wouldn't pick me for wrong reasons!!!
But don't people tend to look at obstacles they wish to avoid? Is this just a habit they would have to unlearn quick?
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Jilles
>With eye tracking, software can notice that the user is looking all over the screen, probably trying to find the right menu item or command. This is a signal to pop up help or (on Windows machines) advertise instruction manuals for sale at Amazon.
Oh my god, no matter where you look... Clippy pops up!
- Muggins the Mad
do you have a reference for that? There was a cool experiment designed to measure people's response time that went as follows:
The subject sat looking at a screen with a slide projected on it. They were given a button which advanced the slide, and told to press it when they felt like it - when they were bored by the image they were currently looking at. A set of electrodes measured various brain waves - there was an obvious signal before the button was pressed that was decribed as the onset potential: it was assumed to be related to the decision to change the slide.
The interesting thing happened when instead of using the subject's button-press to advance the slide, the experimenters secretly started using the onset-potential (plus a time delay) as the trigger instead.
When this happened, subjects reported that the slide moved on before they'd decided to press the button, and that the projecter seemed to know what they were about to do....
Freaky, and similar to your menu story. I collect this kind of thing, I would love a reference if you have one...
if they can scan your pupils, chances are they can tell if you're drunk/stoned/under the influence.
IANAPE (i am not a pupil expert), but i think our buddies in law enforcement and our kind neighbors in the insurance companies would be interested if that level of detail were practical.
i remember reading a paper that came out of USC (i think) bart kosko and the fuzzy logic people.
they were able to make vehicle sims behave more or less like a flock of birds -- weaving this way or that, without coming into contact.
there was also some mention of tiny low power solar powered chips that you could simply toss along the roads and program with positional data.
than any car traveling the road knows just where it is located.
driving can be very monotonous/dangerous...especially long trips. i hope someone can move technology fwd enough that (as a start) vehicles would at least come to a controlled stop if the driver were incapacitated.
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"Shades." Wear sunglasses. A little problematic in dim environments, but I'm willing to risk fracturing a shinbone to stick it to Big Brother.
I think its a nice idea but can see some downfalls in the ways of PUPILS being used as any kind of identification which should also be noted for those interested in Biometric security as well.
What will happen when say a person slightly blind using their products, has his pupils deteriorate are there any thoughts on the sensors and their reactions to this?
As for their emotion mouse I doubt it will give an accurate view of someone's psychological profile as there are heavy handed people, light handed people, etc. Will they have a certain buffer for values such as this or will they market it as a stand alone solution for determining this which is 'f(oo)ullproof'. What about persons with an abnormal perspiration problem will it flag them as a nervous wreck and more importantly will it clean itself after they've used that mouse (hey, I'm not sharing my mouse with a sweaty mo' fo now)
Seriously though many factors will make some of these things hard and though some may seem like a great idea I think many are jumping the gun into some sort of a Star Trekkie based environment filled with overhyped products.
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And here's something to think about. Every single photographer I know about switches this feature off after first five minutes of use.
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Given biological variability, effects of some drugs on pupillary reactions (there are drugs that slow pupil contractions, but do not affect concentration or reaction times), different corneal shapes, etc. this sort of technology will have a stack of false positives and negatives plenty high. Is someone going to be arrested for DWI because they take high blood pressure medicine?
Even the effects of race will have to be taken into account. I can tell you that most "face parts isolator" software will not recognise most oriental's eyes.
As far as marketing goes, Yeah, I looked at it. What was my total reaction, though? Did I look at it because I liked it, or because cognitive dissonance told me that it didn't belong here, or because the packaging was so ugly I hated it? All the marketer gets is an eye time. Hope they have ESP to figure out what I was thinking during that period.
On the whole, though, I think you can pass me that pair of mirrored Serengettis.
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The idea behind this technology is at least 15 years old; The first time I ever heard about this technology was from that phenomenon of americanized anime: Robotech! Somewhere in the "second generation," the clever/nerdy character (Louie, I think his name was) invented goggles that tracked pupil movement, which could in turn automatically target weapons systems to whatever the wearer was looking at. The result? Our heroes were able to avoid getting their clocks completely cleaned by the Robotech Masters and their armies of new-and-improved Bioroids (see if you ever get THAT level of inventiveness out of Pokemon or DragonBallz).
:). But I wonder if we're going to start seeing Pupil Pistols, and looks really will be able to kill.
The apps I thought of following watching that were similar to some mentioned here, including hands-free computing (I had never used a mouse, though, so I was thinking of a CLI based on a gaze selected alphabet. Arg.
Ah, speculation...
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What would happen if the whole family sits down to watch TV with papa wanting football and mama a popular soap and junior cartoon?
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
ERICA, Eyegaze Resoponse Interface Computer Aid, computing already exists, and is commercially available at ERICA
. It was developed at the University of Virginia, and I know that both Stephen Hawking and Christopher Reeve use it. It can track your eye movements, move the cursor on the screen, and detect when you want to click on something. I remember helping to test it a few years ago by sitting at a computer with the system installed and looking at a series of pictures. Some were nice things like kittens (aww, how cute, eye relaxes) and some were really graphic porn (yikes! eye contracts).
I'd just like to point out to our international friends that England has not been turned into a 'virtual police state' (as Mr Hayes knows very well, being, as he is, an Englishman).
In fact, since the current government have come into power, the level of policing in the UK has diminished to the same sort of levels recorded back in the 1970's.
I for one (living in south east London) would feel a lot safer if there were more police cameras.
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Actually, seems to me that this technology could have substantial impact on several kinds of disabilities. There are folks who can move their eyes but can't control keyboards and mice. See for instance anyone with Lou Gerhigs or any number of other injuries or illnesses. Although this would also be of use to the normally sighted and functional as well. Just my thoughts - I could be wrong..
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I read a paper on gaze tracking interfaces a few years ago. When they implemented the hierarchical menus, they decided that simply gazing on a menu option briefly should trigger the display of the sub-menu, since it was easy to reverse if you looked elsewhere in the menu.
It turned out that people tended to look up and down on a menu to choose an option, and their gaze would fall on the option that they'd eventually select long before the decision to select it was complete. This had the unnerving effect that users felt that the machine knew what they wanted before they did.
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With eye tracking, software can notice that the user is looking all over the screen, probably trying to find the right menu item or command. This is a signal to pop up help or (on Windows machines) advertise instruction manuals for sale at Amazon. If you know what you're doing, turn that feature off. If you don't, your software is a lot friendlier with it on.
Maybe no more scrolling? Your computer tracks how quickly you read and moves the text by at that rate. This would be a boon for people with weak hands for whatever reason.
And, of course, aiming in Quake will never be the same after the "eyes of death" patch.
Anyway, cool tech.
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On the car front Volvo are apparently keen on eye-tracking technology. As you probably know, Volvo pride themselves on the safest cars in the world (seeing as they invented crash testing more or less, I think we should let them keep that title), and there have been reports on the sort of technology they want to implement in the near future.
One of these technologies is eye-tracking. A small sensor would be mounted in the ceiling above the driver's seat and track the movement of the head and in particular the pupils of the eyes. The details are sketchy, particularly withr regard to how this information would be used and as to what happens when the person is wearing glasses or corrective lenses.
I suppose in principle you could detect drowsiness, lack of concentration, etc. and that information may be useful to the driver there and then. The only problem is, if it's all going to a blackbox, insurance companies are going to want the information to work out as to how often you checked your mirrors, whether you constantly look at your passenger as you are talking to them, etc. and I'm not sure what the safety advantage is in doing this.
If they fit a M$ box with this, you can't even look at it anymore without crashing it...
Mmmm. So how is this new?Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Just to throw my 2 cents in on this, as in the tradition of all /. types- the first thing that popped in my head was using it to determine the window focus in X. I have a nasty habit of turning to my Linux PC, typing, and thinking whatever window I was looking at was the active one.
Then again, maybe I'm lazy beyond belief.
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During my research we used similar eye-tracking device to help changing the view point of an observer in a VR environment. Our subject of testing all induced nausea and vomitting
We failed to get more healthy subject to continue our research, we couldn't solve the problem in stablizing fast eye movement for use in control device. I am really interested in knowing what technology has they deployed to make it useful.
This kind of technology worries me. I mean, it's bad enough that places like England have been turned into virtual police states through the installation of vast numbers of CCTV cameras throughout urban areas, but what if these cameras could not only track where you go and what you do, but everything you even look at?!
Sure, this technology is far too primitive to deal with that kind of surveillance at the moment, but once the initial proof of concept is there, then advances come quickly, and in a few years time a camera may be able to track your eye movements from a hundred yards away.
This really sounds like a horrible application to me, but you can just bed that law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies around the world would love to be able to install these devices in as many places as possible. And can you imagine what advertisers and market research people would pay for this data? Your every action could be profiled and filed for use in targetted marketing schemes based on what you look at in stores.
I'm not saying it'll happen, but it's still a damn scary idea.