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EyeDriver Lets Drivers Steer Car With Their Eyes
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that German researchers have tested a new technology called eyeDriver that tracks a driver's eye movement and, in turn, steers the car in whatever direction they're looking at speeds up to 31 mph. 'The next step will be to get it to drive 60 miles per hour,' says Raul Rojas, an artificial intelligence researcher at Berlin's Free University. A Dodge Caravan fitted with eyeDriver has been tested on the tarmac at an abandoned airport at Tempelhof Airport. However, it remains unclear when — or if — the technology will be commercialized, as questions about safety and practicability abound: What about looking at a cute girl next to the road for a few seconds? Not to mention taking phone calls or typing a text while driving. But the researchers have an answer to distracted drivers: 'The Spirit of Berlin' is also an autonomous car equipped with GPS navigation, scores of cameras, lasers, and scanners that enable it to drive by itself. And should the technology-packed vehicle have a major bug, there's still an old fashioned way of stopping it. Two big external emergency buttons at the rear of the car allow people outside to shut down all systems."
So we want cars to steer towards what we are looking at? Seriously? You want to have all the cute women in the world run over?
So what happens when a long legged angel in a summer dress walks past? Is she going to get run over?
Make sure you don't go into REM sleep at the wheel!
just sayin
Once they figure out how to steer the car by thought, I'm going to be at Taco Bell a lot.
why rehash a joke thats ALREADY IN TFS. 4/6 comments so far are redundant. you guys aren't even trying today.
granted, neither are the editors.
back on topic: WTF? this is a fucking terrible idea. i hate researchers.
Long live the BSD license
"Two big external emergency buttons at the rear of the car allow people outside to shut down all systems"
It can only be stopped if it is stopped...
Or someone with a rock and extremely good aim!
Why would they use Dodge Caravan (and call it...'The Spirit of Berlin' O_o ) when there's so many German minivans for the taking? (heck, VW popularised the concept)
One that hath name thou can not otter
In other other new, bad looking women don't seem to notice the change.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
What could possibly go wrong?
Driving in the direction you are looking is a terrible idea.
Here in the UK you don't pass a driving test without using your rear view mirror, your side mirrors; and looking when appropriate through the side or rear windows. Just because you are looking for potential dangers doesn't mean you want to steer into them (e.g. a car overtaking you). Applying makeup etc. or tuning the radio would be unusually lethal.
Jonathan Paton
I would hate to have this on my car.
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
This scheme can only work in muslim countries with strict requirements for women to cover themselves.
Anywhere else and all the pretty women will soon be run over and killed.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
3... 2... 1...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Kind of like the EyeDriver, but Steve Jobs drives your car with his own eyes. This ensures a consistent driving experience, so long as you only want to go where he sends you.
-Lod
This is a terrible idea because it unnecessarily links control of the car together with attention. Even covert attention (moving your attention around without moving your eyes) is coupled to the eye movement system in the brain (covertly shifting attention to a different part of the visual field really involves planning eye movements towards that spot). You need to have control of your vehicle uncoupled from this process, since driving requires you to pay attention to many things at once. There's no reason to hijack this system for control when we have a very effective one already.
We should be trying to free up our effectors, not shift around responsibilities among them. What we really want to do is to hook into ventral premotor cortex directly with a wireless connection so we can control the car with thought and still have our hands free.
http://roadsafety.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/traffic_causes.jpg
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Blink and you're dead. Don't turn your back. Don't look away. And don't Blink. Good Luck.
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One of the first things you learn in any driver's education class is to constantly scan the road ahead of you and pay attention to your surroundings while driving, which involves a lot of eye movement (generally in the direction of forward, but eye movement nonetheless). What happens to this system when your eyes are looking a few cars ahead? What happens to the system when you're trying to make a lane change? What happens when reversing?
It's an interesting concept, but... Well, tracking eye movement for vehicular control is probably one of the worst applications I can think of. Unless they know something I don't?
But thankfully, should anything go awry at 31~60MPH, you can always run up and hit the big emergency shut-off buttons on the rear exterior of the vehicle.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
What problem is this actually trying to solve? Are people really finding it too difficult use their arms to drive? Or is this aimed at people who can't drive right now, because they have no arms?
An old saying that suddenly starts to seem a lot more important.
Unforunately now, you can't look both ways at a 4-way stop anymore, because you'll wind up turning.
Advanced driving courses always teach scanning techniques for driving that include looking not only where you are going, but constantly scanning for pedestrians on either side of the road, cars that may or may not see you about to turn in front of you, cars in your left and right side mirrors, and cars in your rear view mirror. They also teach to always have an escape route: if the unexpected happens, always have a place you can steer to to avoid a hazard without crashing into another car or a pedestrian. You can't do these things if you always have to look only where you want the car to go. Peripheral vision is not acute enough to pick up, for example, the shadow of a person's feet beneath a huge SUV parked on the side of a road, where that person may suddenly step out in front of you without looking since the SUV is blocking both your and their line of sight. Unless entirely autonomous, the vehicle's control surfaces HAVE to be independent of eye movement, because situational awareness depends on it (even in some cases the ability to turn your head to check a blind spot, or to see if your kid in the back seat isn't choking on his or her toys).
No sig now
People do this already. To learn to drive a car, ride a bike, ski, or control any other type of vehicle, you go through a learning process where you commit the control procedures to muscle memory. Once you have that covered, you pretty much go where you want to go, without necessarily thinking 'ok, now I need to turn the steering wheel'.
By and large, barring any significant equipment failure, you pretty much go towards whatever has your attention - for better or worse. Target fixation is alive and well in pretty much all of us. If you're on your bike and you keep staring at it, you'll most likely hit it. If you look at the path around it, most likely you won't. It has nothing to do with your ability to control the bike, and everything with the ability to control your attention.
I feel really bad for the poor guy changing the flat tire, or getting the traffic ticket...but as a Darwinist it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
If your car's design requires a pair of "big external emergency buttons at the rear", there's definitely something wrong with your design.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
What happens when you blink? Or sneeze?
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With most people that drive while texting or looking cellphone, the car should see that idiot is not looking at road and pull over to the side of the road safely so that the idiot knows that person is no looking at the road.
"You have chosen to look at an accident. Would you like to join the accident?"
Especially given how many people find it necessary to constantly make eye contact with their passengers when talking. Ah, well. At least it would cull the herd. It's too bad it'll take out so many innocents in the process though; surely there's a more efficient way.
Alright, that aside... it looks like it won't be that sensitive after RTFA:
"The car stops at intersections and asks the driver for guidance on which road to take," the researchers say. A few seconds of attention with the driver looking in his desired direction get the car flowing again.
Heh. That'll be even better. Could you imagine stopping at every intersection... "Please indicate direction..." ... roll forward a block ... "please indicate direction..." ... roll forward...
Why would anyone take the time to design a device like this without having any understanding of what a normal driver does with their eyes in the course of operating a motor vehicle? Could the designer possibly be such a bad driver that they only look ahead where they are going? Why would anyone fund a design program run by someone that doesn't even know how to drive? That would be like hiring Sarah Palin to be president.
I've never understood this desire for eye controlled devices. With the exception of targeting a personal firearm, my eyes bounce around to so many objects so fast that I can barely type a sentence without getting completely distracted. If the cursor was controlled by my eyes while I was typing this paragraph would be nothing but a jumble of text, and half the letters would be strewn about my office.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
There's a lot of problems, but no one has mentioned drunk drivers yet. The problem with drunk drivers is that they'll fixate on something in front of them and follow it. That's why you have to pay attention at night if you are parked on the side of the road with your lights on. Drunk drivers will hone in on your lights and hit you. Seems like this eye-drive would only make that easier. Then again I guess a drunk driver is pretty deadly even without this.
(Bonus points if you can tell me whether I'll get sued by apple or BMW first for the iDrive pun)
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Have the developers of this product never driven before?
and never even bothered to read a book about recommended/required driving practices?
It is impossible to drive while just looking at were you have to drive.
you have to check gauges, mirrors, keep an eye all other traffic, etc.
I suppose you could drive down the street with this and you might not get into an accident, but you would never be allowed to pass a drivers test.
As far as I can tell this idea is fundamentally flawed and cannot ever possibly work.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
So when there is a car accident on the side of the road... everyone will just drive into it?..
s/©//g
'The Spirit of Berlin' is also an autonomous car equipped with GPS navigation, scores of cameras, lasers and scanners that enable it to drive by itself. And should the technology-packed vehicle have a major bug, there's still an old fashioned way of stopping it. Two big external emergency buttons at the rear of the car allow people outside to shut down all systems.
Else the Spirit of Berlin might start looking like the Spirit of Dresden fairly quickly... but if the thing ends up out of control, what the hell good will buttons outside the thing do? Are they expecting someone to chase it?
"What's the use in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes?" --Fourth Doctor, "Robot"
An eye controlled firearm might make more sense. It sights where you look. And it could fire every time you blink. Now we are talking. If you blinked every time a weapon fired it would be fully automatic fire. It would make a great hunting weapon.
Just don't look at the oncoming Traffic. This is a late April fools joke, me thinks !
So we want cars to steer towards what we are looking at? Seriously? You want to have all the cute women in the world run over?
While the comment WAS funny there is a problem with something like that already.
It's been known for decades that drunk drivers tend to fixate on flashing yellow lights and then steer toward them. This makes using flashing yellow lights as a warning counter-productive.
Oregon, for instance, long ago switched away from blinky-yellow lights to the rear on police cars to use as warning lights when they have people pulled over - with a significant reduction in car-hits-cop-at-traffic-stop incidents.
California, of course, has standardized on big yellow blinky-lights for cop car pullover warnings. (I recall a few years back when San Jose was lamenting how many of their new fleet of cruisers had been smashed by drunk drivers that year...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Of course with the iDriver, your route will have to be approved by apple 3 weeks in advance.
There's an App for that!
IANAS, but couldn't they seriously cut these practicality issues in half if they just used head rotation instead of eye position?
What if some people want some sort of "round lever" if you will, that we can use with our manipulators [hands] on to receive instant tactile feedback about the road?
Anyone ride a motorcycle? They always teach you to "look through your turns" because the bike tends to go where your head is aimed. Regularly accidents happen in which a bike swerves into another vehicle because the rider panics and looks where they don't want to go instead of where they do. Now we can bring this great feature to cars?
"Wow, can she really wear shorts that sh-" **CRASH**
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Don't look directly at that car that's about to t-bone yours.
What happens when a deer runs onto the shoulder of the road in front of you? Most people would probably look at the deer, not away from it.
Have you read my blog lately?
This ensures a consistent driving experience, so long as you only want to go where he sends you.
Yes, but on the other hand you are automatically re-routed around all of the upside-down Vista cars.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
right into their cellphone...
What word rhymes with buried alive?
They should have used a black Pontiac Firebird Trans Am.
Oh and they should also implement a voice control and response system
... is this about doing it because they can?
while I can see some uses for this, I can't really see any reason to do it because of the dangers.
First off, if it's for people with no arms, or handicapped arms, I think there's a better alternative then driving.
the other thing that worries me is, at least when I was in driving school, that your supposed to be paying attention to whats around you. Glance at the review mirror, glance at the side mirrors, look at whats in front of you thru the front, not just the spot your trying to go to.
In fact, they made it a point to tell us NOT to get fixated on where your driving, because you'll zone out whats around you.
then again, we don't have the autobahn here in the USA.
Be seeing you...
... if you are riding down the road and see an object (such as a pothole or large stone or piece of exhaust pipe) that you wish to avoid, THE LAST THING YOU DO IS LOOK AT IT, because you do ride where you look.
This is a lesson that bikers learn the hard way, you fall off and get hurt.
Car drivers are different, so you will have car drivers who notice obstacles in the road as being more visually interesting than the blacktop itself, and promptly drive though / over / into all of them.
"Rubbernecking" also means that every single accident suddenly becomes a gravitational black hole, and the possibility of any vehicle passing it without adding to it approaches zero.
The steering wheel works perfectly well, just ask Michael Schumacher, if you are going to mess with that then go directly to fully automated, cut the human right out of the control system.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Pretty much everyone here recognize the stupidity of this idea, yet the researchers don't. Are they aliens?
Sure someone drives into a jogger at 60mph, but then a few people turn their heads at the gruesome sight.. they just cant look away.. Then the concerned people realize whats going to happen and cant look away.. before long you have smoking piles of cars in a mountain of carnage.
Funny.
But a realistic case is when the driver wear sun glasses.
This is basically a device that, instead of the driver giving it orders, it guesses what the driver want to do.
I don't know how anyone can come up with idea as stupid as this.
It's much worse than autopilot cars.
Although the reliability of an autopilot car is doubtful, at the very least, it analyse road condition.
What does this device do? It monitors the input device of the driver.
Squirrel!
A driver benefits just as much from the tactile feedback they receive from the steering wheel as they do from looking where they are going. Why in the world would anyone want to steer a car and not be able to feel the road?
Evidently LOTS of people like to be removed from the driving equation given how many American cars are engineered to NOT give drivers any feedback (SUVs, large sedans like the Crown Victoria and its ilk, random crappy car with the sponge suspension and numb steering, etc.).
If I were Scarlett Johansen, I'd be afraid, very afraid.