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Eye-based Navigation Research From IBM

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-to-be-licensed-to-girlfriends dept.

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."

1 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Shades of 1984 by Dan+Hayes · · Score: 5

    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.