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Let Your Pupils Do the Typing

Posted by timothy on from the eager-pupils dept.

New submitter s.mathot writes: Researchers from France and the Netherlands have developed a way to—literally—write text by thinking of letters. (Academic paper [open access], non-technical blog, YouTube video.) This technique relies on small changes in pupil size that occur when you covertly (from the corner of your eye; without moving your eyes or body) attend to bright or dark objects. By presenting a virtual keyboard on which the 'keys' alternate in brightness, and simultaneously measuring the size of the eye's pupil, the technique automatically determines which letter you want to write; as a result, you can write letters by merely attending to them, without moving any part of your body, including the eyes.

3 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Is this really new? by Z00L00K · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I think that eye movement tracking have been studied for a long time as an input method, mostly for handicapped people that lacks movement in a major part of their body.

    What about the system Stephen Hawking uses?

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    1. Re:Is this really new? by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This one is probably slightly different: rather than trying to track where you are looking, you examine the pupil change to try and find out what letter they are looking at. Sounds terribly unreliable and expensive.

    2. Re:Is this really new? by marciot · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If you can't move your eyes at all, then I don't see how you can "attend" to anything. Vision isn't possible without continuous saccades, your eyes are always moving.

      You can actually focus your attention on objects in your periphery without moving you eyes to it. In vision therapy there is an exercise where you stare fixedly at a dot in the center of the page while finding letters that are scattered throughout the page. You can actually do this with some practice, although it's not particularly natural. Here is the exercise:

      https://visionhelp.files.wordp...

      An interesting aspect of the test is that letters away from the center are printed much larger since the resolution of your vision drops sharply the further away you get from the fixation point.