Industry News Aug. 11, 2017
If you have used Samsung Galaxy S4, I think you are not strange to the concept of “eye control”. But in fact, this is only part of “eye control”. The real eye control can do many things, for example, move the cursor on UI, type with eyes, open the application and realize other operations.
.jpg)
But these are scenes not only existing in the science fiction film. As long as you provide a Tobii Eye Tracker 4C device in the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview, you can use this cool feature. For example, stare at the icon of Chrome on the desktop to open the browser; stare at the screen keyboard to type instead of the keyboard.
It is the content that Tobii Technology cooperates with Microsoft. This eye control technology will become a native function built in Windows 10 in future. It will be named “Eye Control”.
.jpg)
In fact, Tobii Technology, a Swedish company providing this technology, has ten years of eye tracking technology and has a certain advantage in identification precision and speed.
It mainly uses the infrared light emitted by the device to determine the position of user’s eyes and then utilizes two sensors to shoot 30 frame/second images. As the user's retina and cornea will be captured in the whole process, the system can construct the real-time 3D model for the user’s eyes according to the these data, and track the focus of eye through the three-dimensional space to finally realize the eye control.
In Tobii's view, this technology has a very profound significance. It can provide a new way to the user to fundamentally change the interaction with the device.
At present, Microsoft just defines this fancy control way as an auxiliary function, aiming to help the users suffering from neurornuscular diseases (such as patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other disabled people) use computers through eyes in case the mouse and keyboard cannot be used.
.jpg)
In addition, Microsoft has also closely cooperated with Tobii. Except supported Tobii Eye Tracker 4C, other eye tracking products such as Tobii Dynavox PCEye Mini, PCEye Plus, EyeMobile Plusand I - series will be supported soon.
.jpg)
Demonstration of Tobii eye tracking technology on VR
Although we do not know whether the eye control technology will be widely used, in the Tobii’s light of game and VR layout, what they do seems to not only make more disabled people use computers, but also hope to use the eye control to create a more direct and natural interaction mode.
