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eyeBlog

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the you-looking-at-me? dept.

cottonbuds writes "Researchers at Human Media Lab, Queen's University in Canada presented the ECSGlasses: eye contact sensing glasses that report when people look at their wearer. When eye contact is detected, the glasses stream this information to appliances to inform these about the wearer's engagement. According to HML.Blog the ECSGlasses uses a wearable, wireless Eye-Contact Sensor (1.3MB .jpg) to gauge when the user receives eye-contact from an onlooker. eyeBlog uses this information to record and publish face-2-face conversations without dividing the user's attention between the event being recorded, and the device being used to record it. Moreover, because eyeBlog uses eye-contact to start and stop recording, users do not need to sift through hours of footage to find interesting segments. If you are the academic type you can read the paper (2.2MB .pdf), otherwise the video in .mpg (1:49min, 320x240, 7.5MB), or mp4 (1:49min, 320x240, 4.9MB) should explain everything. Video Mirror: .mp4 .mpg."

5 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Better Use by medication · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you poke around the images on the site you'll see that they have already implemented what you're speaking about. TV, and phones being devices that they have shown being controlled by attention/visual focus.

    --
    "If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit." - Mitch Hedberg
  2. Re:why bother by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't think Queens University is suffering for bandwidth. And just FYI, unless the files you're linking to are over 5MB, Freecache will simply pass the link to the original server anyways.

  3. Re:Better Use by idfrsr · · Score: 2, Informative

    Dare I provide another link to send my deparment's server to oblivion, if you search the HML website you find several papers published on that very topic.

    --
    "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
  4. Re:Better Use by FrenZon · · Score: 2, Informative
    And depending on how large the return IR area is, it could also be used to determin where someone is looking at on the screen
    That is pretty close to how many current eye-tracking systems work.

    example1
    example2
    example3 (bulky)
  5. old news? by vivIsel · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Context Aware Computing group at the MIT Media Lab produced Eye aRe years ago. These devices detect attention paid to another such unit (yes, everyone needs to be equipped with one, which is a difference from the canadian item), and not just staring in the general direction: There is a demo, for instance, wherein the wearer can look at a computer, which prompts it to unpause movie playback. Looking away--without turning of the head, eyes only--repauses the movie (this is insanely hard to demo without sound; you can't really tell if it has paused or not when you're looking away, so you look back at it. oops.). The Eye-Are units are certainly smaller, at the very least. To be fair, they're using different technologies, but the optical advanced-ness of the canadian unit seems wasted on a supid application. The usefulness of having inanimate objects--say, appliances--know where you're looking, when, and how (the Eye aRe detects blinking, an increase of which can signal any number of things) seems to dwarf that of some hyper-blogging solution. Both devices, of course, offer a sort of unconscious appliance-control possiblilties, but one is much smaller, and cheaper to manufacture (namely, the Eye aRe).