New Display Keeps an Eye On the Viewer

Al writes "Researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) have developed an OLED display that doubles as a camera. The idea is to use it in lightweight heads-up displays that track users' eye movements, affording some form of gaze-control. The researchers will demonstrate a prototype at the Society for Information Display conference in San Antonio this week. The current version has a simple monochromatic display: it is 1.25 centimeters on each side, with a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels. The team at Fraunhofer IPMS has also partnered with Novaled, an OLED company that manufactures high-quality white diodes, and plans to make color prototypes using the technology."

Comments

Eye tracking glasses

[mrjb]

1.25 centimeters- that's half an inch. Perhaps a bit too small yet for use in a monitor- but probably reasonably easy to scale up to the size of a pair of glasses. Incorporating a camera display on the inside of a pair of glasses would make eye tracking much simpler, and reduce any privacy concerns- Even if someone would be watching along with the video stream being captured by the glasses, all there would be to see would be eye movements.

Has been being researched for a while

[tomalpha]

I remember doing work experience at Philips Research Labs back in the mid nineties and they were working on a similar concept back then - a monitor that doubled as a flatbed scanner. It was based on an lcd monitor, with small gaps between pixels to allow light to pass through to the scanner at the back. The big challenges were getting the focal depth right, and avoiding refraction(?) patterns after the light had passed through the screen portion.

They seemed to have gotten roung that problem by placing the photoreceptors and lcd pixels at the same level. Can't wait to see a monitor sized one.