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Gaze Detector Lets You Hear With Your Eyes
tinkertim writes "Engadget is reporting that Manabe Hiroyuki has developed a personal 'being' assistant, the wearable headphone gaze detector. The device apparently takes notice of what you look at (and hear) and makes note of the more important events in your life that it records. From the article '[the device] is slightly less elegant than the traditional neural implant, with this system you could not only record the goings on of your days and "bookmark" important events, but also train the cameras to feed you information about your surroundings based on QR codes or possibly eventually object recognition; think of it as augmented aural reality triggered by giving a passing glance.'"
Why do I get the feeling that the main events this will record are hot girls passing by?
When the company that makes the software for this bundles spyware with it, how much are they going to make letting advertisers (and the occasional law enforcement agency) know what you've been looking at?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
If this were a lot smaller it might be a useful aid, particularly for those with memory problems. But we use something similar for web page design, where it's very useful indeed. By monitoring where the eyes move you can get a very good read on how people use a site and design accordingly.
wow this sounds kinda scary in some ways.. what if you look at the goatse guy or tubgirl?!? I don't want to hear THAT!!
Does it have a speaker that yells, "shwing!" every time you see an awesome pair of breasts?
The "Far Side" cartoon where the guy is wearing the Dog Translation Helmet, and all the dogs are saying "Hey!" "Hey!" "Hey!".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
To me it looks like a bloke wearing headphones with loads of wires coming out of it. I'm having difficulty believing that this device can record eye movements.
Does this actually follow your gaze without looking at your eyes? Surely the headphones can't be sensitive enough to pick up the neural or nervous signalling?
Still, it seems quite rudimentary compared with other AR projects like Tinmith: http://www.tinmith.net/
All I see is some dumb looking guy with dumb looking headphones, and no real explanation of what either of them does.
Gaze detector activated: recording: boobs boobs boobs boobs eyes floor
I'll always remember this day as the first time I realised that there was such a thing as a traditional neural implant. ... And wondered if had been asleep for a decade or two.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Part of the fun of life is developing your own ability to distill the experiences of life into perceptions and integrating them into your own mind and later being able to adapt to future experiences by drawing upon your stored knowledge and being able to behave at least somewhat optimally.
People have being doing this with varying degrees of success for tens of thousands of years.
Now I have google desktop search installed on my laptop, and it has indexed my life. Everything I've ever seen on this machine for the past year, it remembers and knows about and can search for within seconds (CTRL-CTRL anyone?). Gigabytes of history. Every single web page I've ever visited (except those which I've deliberately excluded by using a virtual machine, torpark, etc). It knows more than I've learned (at least with respect to indexable keywords and strings) in the past year.
It's kind of scary sometimes. There are some things you would want to forget. But it's so darn handy.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
God - I definitly would not want my Fiancee to be able to see what/who I was staring at all day.
:)
These files better be secure
More appropriate movie reference, "The Final Cut", a movie where someone takes your entire life which is recorded on some implant and splices a montage of events at your funeral.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I've just invented a levitating car (patents pending). Sure, it's less elegant than the traditional flying car, but I've never been a slave to tradition anyway.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
This is a really cool device, I've been looking forward to this for so long that I've contemplated building it myself.
Remember that augmented reality is what virtual reality isn't: Useful for everyday life. Imagine a device like this linked with a wearable computer. Imagine it puts everyone whose face you look at for more than a second into a face-recognition search to find out whether you know that person, and if so it shows you some details (full name, birthday, any important details you entered into your contacts database to make sure you never forget about this person) via some unobstrusive HUD.
Or imagine shopping with a wearable computer with online connection which can tell you that the gadget you're about to buy sells at $0.50 more next door, but they have 1 year guarantee instead of 6 months and a much better score on customer reviews.
Or, to simplify it again, just imagine having a device with you that records everything you see in a round-robin storage of just a minute or two - suddenly you can store all those moments that happened two seconds before you remembered to grab your digicam.
Augmented reality is a way cool research subject. If I were in university again, this is where I'd be heading.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
> However, I know many business people that prefer to talk rather than write
You misspelled "think".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Millions of people depend on wheel chairs and personal care workers to do almost everything for them. If this gaze detection could be developed a bit more, these people could type (even those without use of their arms or hands) record conversations selectively, operate home lighting and heating controls, and holler for help if they fall or (as frequently happens) a care person fails to show up.
My wife (and the agency she works for) works with a large population of people for whom technology hasn't quite fulfilled its promise yet. They have great electric wheel chairs and other adaptive technologies, but a real usable interface is still seemingly just around the corner. Except for a few early adopters of substantial means, of course.