Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
----------------------------
-----------------------
Moderator's essentials
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..
Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves. -George Gordon
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.
--
Xenu loves you!
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.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
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.
-r0bb
How much is your freedom worth?
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.