Slashdot Mirror
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."
... 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.
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!
Can't wait for these googles to be plugged into my window manager!
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.