CES 2014: Danish Company Promises Low-Cost Eye Trackers For the Masses (Video)

Their website's "About" page says, under the headline, "Our Big Mission": "The Eye Tribe intends to become the leading provider of eye control technology for mass market consumer devices by licensing the technology to manufacturers." Their only product at the moment is a $99 development kit ($142.50 with shipping and VAT). Some people may want to say, "This is old news. Wasn't there an open source project called Gaze Tracker that was originally developed to help handicapped people interact with the world?" Yes, there was. The Eye Tribe is an outgrowth of the Gaze Tracker research group, which is still going strong and still offers its software for free download (from SourceForge) under an open source license. The company's funding comes in large part from a government grant. In the interview (below), The Eye Tribe CEO Sune Johansen notes that they have just started shipping their development kit, and that they hope to start selling an eye control kit for tablet computers to the general public before long, but he doesn't want to commit to a specific shipping date because they don't want to sell to end users until "...we have enough applications out there so that it makes sense for the consumers to buy it directly."

Comments

What about the "Midas Effect" ... ?

[pcor]

There is research work from the 1980's & 90's on the use of eye tracking for UI. Eyes tend to naturally scan around a scene - when the user becomes conscious that their gaze will 'affect' control regions in the UI they try to restrict this natural eye movement and it yields an uncomfortable sensation known as the 'Midas Effect'. This is mentioned and cited in this more recent paper: Real-Time Eye Gaze Tracking for Gaming Design and Consumer Electronics Systems
Sorry I'm too lazy to extract the original citation ... but it is worth tracking down and reading about how eye-gaze have been well known as a UI technique going back to the 1980's!