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eyeBlog
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."
I am often able to sense eye contact without any sensors at all. Anyone else?
... can be found in this month's issue of WIRED magazine. There was quite an interesting blogging device that looked like a can. It had a video recorder, audio recorder, and a fold-out screen.
Can we expect this device to be on the market anytime soon?
Im pretty sure if your wearing those glasses everyone will be looking at you...pointing and laughing.
from the article on HP's site:
Your daughter's first smile. Your son's joy the first time he catches a ball. The wink your favorite uncle always gave you, but that he'd never do on camera.
Uhhhh, WHAT?
i was all thinking "yay neat inconspicuous social paranoia spy stuff" before i clicked the 1.3mb photo button.
i was wrong in that assumption, btw.
Very interesting behavior, but social and ethical rules may not be tolerable to such device.
This could be very handy for computer control. For instance your computer might only accept voice commands from you while you are looking straight at it (as opposed to saying something stupid to your friend like "What is the FORM MATerial of the SEA DRIVE?")
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 (with say 3 or 4 IR sensors to triagulate position based on return signal strength).
Then again, the down side is now we geeks NEED to make eyecontact.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
And just what the hell will happen if you're giving a speech or performance for 10k people? All looking at you at once as your contacts get Slashdotted and fry to a crisp...
No thanks -- I'll keep my old fashioned contacts.
-JemHow does it determine eye contact? Someone could appear to be looking at you. But in reality, you could easily be in their line of sight. It doesn't necessarily mean they're looking at you, let alone making eye contact.
If someone is staring at you, the glasses take a picture for them so it lasts longer.
Can't wait for these googles to be plugged into my window manager!
How about taking a photo every time you're transfixed on an amazing chest or bottom? That's a blog a lot more people would appreciate :)
Researchers found that the eyeBlog was only 28% effective when used by female wearers, but couldn't reproduce the effect in the lab. After some field trials, however, they discovered and corrected the problem. The new eyeBlog-II for women is 96% accurate and will be completed sometime next month. Rather than attaching the sensors to eyeglasses, the eyeBlog-II will be embedded into a bra.
This reminds me of that device (I forget who developed it) which looked like a cycle helmet and had the ability to recognise objects. As with so much technology, I get concerned as to what we're actually trying to achieve here... I'm having a forgetful day, but who was it said man is just trying to make a machine in his own image? Seems increasingly valid...Show me a machine that shocks the wearer every time they perform a ridiculously stupid act, now that would be a step forward.
I wonder what the latency is between when someone hears something interesting, and when they look up at the person who is speaking.
It seems to me that this sort of thing (great as the idea is) should be recording full-time, and then discarding anything that hasn't prompted the wearer's interest with "N" seconds.
There are probably also ways to detect the wearer's interest outside of trying to figure if they are looking at a person. Eyeball behaviour. Head behaviour. Mental activity. Probably the sorts of cluster of patterns that some sort or neural net would do well with once it was trained to recognise them.
It's all a great idea though, and naturally enough one that has seen more mature versions appearing in SF books for decades. Good to see reality moving in this direction too.
Or did anyone else feel creeped out by those shiny eyes? I had no idea there were so many Goa'uld walking around? Brr, I may have to wear my trusty Joo Janta 200 super-Chromatic contact lenses undertneath.
Mmm. Does the system provide flood protection in a magic house of mirrors ? Hate to see ones brain explode due to a infinite recursion failure in his or hers glasses.
Actually, I think this is great for people who suffer a physical handicap (eg. paralysed).
Nowadays there are similar systems. A paralysed friend of mine uses a small LED beamer attached to his glasses to use the computer. By moving his head, he moves the red dot on the screen which functions as the cursor. A sensor of some kind interpretes the signal and moves the cursor.
Pretty expensive piece of equipment, though.
Well, instead they could use some of those sensors to track eye movement and position in relation to the computer screen.
Being given the proper use, I think these gizmo's will eventualy find their way on the right market.
Get it through your heads, people: Numerals are not syllables and connot be substituted for them. "2" is NOT the same thing as "to". "1" cannot be substituted for the "one" in "someone". "4" is NOT the same thing as "for".
If you are going to use these kinds of sloppy, illegible, ugly, non-standard substitutions, just go whole hog. No point in half measures. Example:
Is that what you want? To sound like an illiterate 14 year old girl on AIM? Then understand it now: Numerals and syllables are not interchangable. When you act like they are, you cheapen the quality of life of everyone who accidentally reads your fetid heap of alphanumeric garbage.
I did NOT learn everything I need to know in kindergarten.
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).
The thing is, men make eye contact to initiate a conversation, but usually do NOT maintain eye contact throughout the conversation. It's a well known ethological fact that men look away often during conversations, sometime conducting entire face to face conversations without almost no eye contact. It's a primal aggression thing: looking away signals submission, trust, or goodwill, while holding gaze is a challenge. The same does not generally hold true for women, or men talking to women. Eye contact is held much more consistently.
Notice next time you're talking to a male colleague. Feel the discomfort if you try to prolong eye contact. Then compare when talking to a woman.
Oh, wait. This is Slashdot....