Samsung Shows 'Eye Mouse' For People With Disabilities

Samsung today announced a project among a group of its engineers to build an input device that allows people with limited mobility to operate a computer through eye movement alone. The EYECAN+ is a rectangular box that needs to be situated roughly 60-70cm away from a user's face. Once calibrated, it will superimpose a multifunction UI and track a user's eye movements to move the cursor where they want. Samsung says they won't be commercializing this device, but they'll soon be making the design open source for any company or organization who wants to start building them.

Comments

goodwill

[mriswith]

Well that's one pretty decent way to get some good karma with the open source comunity and help people at the same time :)

Re:goodwill

[AaronLS]

Someone will come along and try to find some way to make it out to be an act of evil. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Re:goodwill

[houstonbofh]

This would make me RULE Deathmatch in a FPS! Yeah!
Only a little evil...

Re:goodwill

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I gotta say this is awfully decent of Samsung. So many other companies would have thought only to profit off of something like this.

Kudos for them

[Anonymous Coward]

for open sourcing this potentially life changing technology. I am shure it will change the life thousands all over the world.

An even better idea

[TheRealMindChild]

Combine the eye focus with the mouse to constrain the movements of the cursor for the best of both worlds!

Re:An even better idea

[Anonymous Coward]

have you ever tried to use a mouse with a prosthetic hand? i assure you, the mouse has absolutely no value to me

What is new here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eye tracking for computer control has been available commercially for decades (ASL, SMI, LC Technologies, etc) primarily as assistive technology for persons with disabilities (quadriplegics who are paralyzed and cannot move hands or other body parts).

In the last couple years the price has come way down on the eye tracking devices, so they are now in the $100-$150 range (such as the Tobii EyeX). With that kind of a price on the hardware it would be difficult to build devices at home that had the same level of capability (namely getting dual cameras with semi co-axial IR LEDs and the right lens configuration).

Some of them can do things such as "teleport" the cursor to your current gaze location on the screen using a hotkey, or blur/scramble all the parts of a screen which you are *not* looking at (which goes relatively unnoticed by the primary user but renders the screen nearly unreadable to any bystanders.

So aside from saying they will open source the design, what is new and noteworthy about this? Have the improved the UI in some way which is not available or has not been thought of by other designers and users of eye tracking devices?

Re:What is new here?

[pherthyl]

Every research team who discovers the disability market seems to set out to build an affordable eye tracker. And they all fail. I should know I was on such a team :)

Re:What is new here?

[SuricouRaven]

Eventually the technology will improve and bring the price down. You can get cameras for £5 now, and even cheap hardware can have the capability for real-time image processing. Eventually it'll probably be incorporated into the Google Glass v7 - not as a disability aid, but as a hands-free input device.

Good for them.

[sconeu]

This is commercially available now, Dynavox and Tobii have offered it for a while.

The BIG news here is the open sourcing. Well done, Samsung.

Re:Good for them.

[Sycraft-fu]

Also sounds like it may be much cheaper, which would be nice. I have repetitive strain injury from computer use and while it is manageable, I'd like a way to be able to not use the mouse when possible. An eye mouse would work well, but they are too much money. However this sounds like it might be in the range of something I could afford, and use as alternate input.

Re:Good for them.

[sconeu]

You'd be surprised at how *TIRING* using an eye mouse is. My late wife bitched about it all the time.

Stephen Hawking

[Anonymous Coward]

Just watched Hawking's bio on PBS last night - I wonder if he has enough motion left in his eyes to become a beta tester.

Why not for phones? Or regular computer users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it slower or not accurate enough? Can't say the number of times my fingers blocked the screen and I hated it.

Is Apple going to come along and pick this up for free?

Eye Hacks!

[tomxor]

All i could think when seeing this, how will online FPS games detect this? :P And i thought ear hacks were good...

A new level of hope

[Contract Gypsy]

After doing quite a bit of work making it easier for my father, who had Parkinson's, to use a mouse via 3d accelerometers and firmware, this approach is wonderful news. The accelerometer approach worked at first, but as the tremors got worse, the signal to noise ratio became unmanageable. Personally, having MS along with hereditary peripheral neuropathy, I am reasonably certain that within the coming years it will be necessary for me to use this technology. I will definitely make use of this open source "gift" and do what I can with it to help others, and while I'm at it, myself.