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Let Your Pupils Do the Typing
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.
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.
Hawking still uses a system activated by a muscle in his cheek, one of the few over which he still has some level of control, which is then detected by an IR sensor in his glasses. Earlier versions used a small joystick while he still had some control over a few fingers (or maybe it was just one), but the system has been adapted as he's lost more and more control.
This system might allow him to continue working even if he loses the last vestiges of control over his facial muscles.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I understand the confusion, but this technique does not rely on eye tracking in the sense of measuring eye position. It relies on measuring the size of the pupil, while the eyes don't move. So our technique is more comparable to so-called brain-computer interfaces than to conventional eye tracking. (Of course, eye tracking and similar devices (such as the cheek system used by Stephen Hawking) have been around for years, and if (eye) movement is possible, these are more efficient.)
So this isn't about exploitation of students, then?
Careful when your boss is near, you might spell "asshole" before you're realizing it. :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"and you could even use a bogstandard $15 webcam."
Have any scammers tried this technique at ATMs using a tiny, concealable camera, now that EMV card readers are preventing crooks from skimming the users?
Right after they clean the blackboard and erasers.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They started morphing into programmer mills churning out dBase III, COBOL, coders and now they teach everything from Java to Ansys Fluid Mechanics R17.1 (Register for two courses and AutoCAD is free!)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
EMACS is indeed the only software that ever caused me physical injury.
After a multi-day editing binge on a CKIE keyboard I went to the campus medical center. Muscle strain on my left pinky from rotate/stretch/curl of my large hands to hit control ...
Now, I would never tamper with University property but a couple of days later days later, there was a little piece of plastic next to my keyboard , and the shift-lock no longer toggled allowing me to remap the control key to where God meant it tone. . .
hawk
It appears as if the letters are separated into two groups and that within that group the alternation of brightness is perfectly synchronized to the other letters in the group and opposite the color to the letters in the opposing group. Smaller sets of letters are presented over time until one letter is chosen. So this appears to be a binary search that reads one bit at a time, based strictly on the phase of the brightness signal.
What makes me wonder is why this is so constrained. Could the brightness of each letter be controlled independently to encode the letter directly? Perhaps the user could be presented with a full keyboard, with each "key's" brightness modulated to a different binary code. Presumably then the code of the character that the user was fixating on could be read from the pupil diameter variation directly?
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.