eye-tracking
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Honor teases the Magic 6 smartphone with eye-tracking and a built-in LLM
Honor just teased its new flagship smartphone at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit. The Magic 6 will boast eye-tracking and a built-in AI assistant developed using a large language model.
HTC reveals face and eye-tracking accessories for the Vive Focus 3 VR headset
The Facial Tracker is $99, while the Eye Tracker will run you $249.
Tobii says it's in talks to provide eye tracking for Sony's PlayStation VR2
Tobii says it's in talks to provide eye tracking for Sony's PlayStation VR2 headset, suggesting the hardware isn't close to launch.
TD Pilot will let people with disabilities control iPads with their eyes
TD Pilot aims to bring the iPad experience to the estimated 50 million people globally who need communication assistance.
AI gauges the mental health of cancer patients through eye movements
Researchers have developed AI that can determine mental health by tracking eye movements, although it may be a long while before the tech is practical.
Add eye tracking to your HTC Vive headset for $149
VR companies have been hyping up eye tracking for years, yet even today, options are limited when it comes to VR headsets with integrated eye-tracking -- namely the HTC Vive Pro Eye we first saw back at CES. Thankfully, a Chinese company dubbed 7invensun is soon offering a $149 upgrade kit that will let existing HTC headsets gain the same feature. Not bad considering the Vive Pro Eye costs $1,599. Pre-orders will commence in mid-November, followed by shipment in December.
Hulu hackathon leads to eye-tracking controls for Roku
Of the 40 project ideas that came out of Hulu's annual hackathon this summer, more than a quarter addressed the needs of users with disabilities. Today, Hulu shared some of those accessibility-focused concepts.
Researchers create eye-tracking glasses that auto-focus where you look
Researchers at Stanford University have created glasses that track your eyes and automatically focus on whatever you're looking at. The so-called autofocals, detailed in a paper published in the journal Science Advances, could prove a better solution than transition lenses or progressive lenses.
Sony's popular A7 III camera now tracks your pet's eyes
Sony is making its already top-notch A7 III and A7R III cameras better with the release of a new firmware update. It introduces a fun AI feature for pet owners called animal eye detection. When set to continuous tracking focus mode, it can focus on your dog's or cat's eyes, ensuring they stay sharp rather than, say, muzzles or fur.
Dell's latest Alienware laptops are VR ready
Dell has revealed a 13-, 15- and 17-inch lineup of thinner, VR-ready Alienware laptops that pack new designs and whiz-bang eye-tracking features. For gamers, the main attraction is support for the latest NVIDIA laptop cards. The big-screen Alienware 17 gets the top-end NVIDIA GTX 1080 chip, while the Alienware 15 and 13 get the GTX 1070 and 1060, respectively. That means that all three models will be "VR-ready" for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets.
You can now buy MSI's eye-tracking laptop
MSI has revealed that people can now pick up the flagship GT72S laptop for the princely sum of $2,599.99. Unlike other high-end gaming devices, this one has a trick up its sleeve: Tobii's eye-tracking sensor technology. We've previously showed you prototypes of the kit, but after six months in the labs, it's now ready for prime time. As before, the device's extra sensors will let your eyes interact with the game as long as there's support for it. So far, titles like Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, Assassin's Creed: Rogue and Elite: Dangerous are all able to take advantage of the GT72S' extra hardware.
Pizza Hut's eye-tracking menu knows what you want before you do
When scanning a menu, are you justifying that Dame Blanche sundae in your mind rather than actually choosing a dessert? Pizza Hut wants to help you skip your super-ego middleman and just let your id order that triple-cheese bacon pepperoni pie directly. It's "Subconscious Menu" uses Tobii's eye-tracking tech to figure out which of 20 different ingredients you're looking at on a screen (see the video below). It then takes all of three seconds to identify the pizza you really want based on which you looked at the longest. Pizza Hut says its Subconscious Menu is still in trials, but after testing to a 98 percent success rate, it may eventually appear in restaurants.
Samsung reveals new eye-tracking mouse for the disabled
Samsung has just unveiled the EyeCan+, a next-gen version of its eye-tracking mouse. Positioned below a monitor, it helps people with disabilities write and edit documents or surf the web using eye movement and blinking. Created as a a labor of love by Samsung engineers on their own time, the new version has major improvements over the original 2012 model, largely thanks to quadriplegic grad student Hyung-Jin Shin. Through 17 months of extensive use, he helped the team refine the UI to make it as easy to use as possible. Though it won't take the EyeCan+ to market, Samsung will build a limited number for charity organizations. As before, it will also create open-source documents for the design and software, letting any individual or company commercialize it.
In movies, CGI is best when you don't even notice it
Cinema screens are huge, which is odd, because the eye can only focus on a small portion of what's in front of it at any one time. That's what prompted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to team up with neuroscientists from Birkbeck, University of London, who in turn recruited eye-tracking firm Tobii. The trio embarked upon a project to determine where people concentrated their gaze. Then, by using Tobii's hardware, were able to create a heat map that was overlaid on the frame, much in the same way that SMI analyzes sports matche. The conclusions from the research found that the best use of CGI isn't to make big robots at the front of the frame, but to fill in all of the spare detail that you're not looking at.
Cleveland Indians want to put ads where fans can see them
Advertisers and sponsors are extremely valuable to all professional sports teams, and thus it is very important to keep them engaged with the fans. In an effort to make this happen, the Cleveland Indians recently partnered with Tobii, a maker of eye-tracking glasses, to conduct a study that could determine what exactly folks look at throughout their time at Progressive Field. The MLB team says it gave 47 fans a pair of Tobii Glasses to use during the span of three days, which were worn as they watched games from various seating areas at its ballpark. Essentially, using the Tobii Insight research program as the basis, the goal was to see how much time participants spent looking at the main scoreboard and other dynamic signage. In theory, this would detect just how valuable certain locations are inside the stadium -- so, the easier it is for you spot it, the more it could potentially cost for a company to put an ad there.
New eye-tracking glasses show others what you're looking at in real time
Researchers and marketers often want to know what catches your eye, whether it's players on the basketball court or just a new shampoo at the store. They may have an easier time figuring this out with Tobii's latest eye-tracking headset, the Tobii Glasses 2. Besides providing a much wider field of view than the original eyewear, the new design has a front-facing 1080p camera that lets observers see whatever you're focused on in real time -- they'll know right away if something gets your attention. The four eye-facing cameras and new software also offer more precise gaze data than the last time around.
Tobii and SteelSeries team up to launch eye-tracking game controller
After spending the better part of a year fine-tuning its technology for Windows 8 machines, eye-tracking specialist Tobii is looking to conquer new market: gaming. With CES just days away, the Swedish company announced today that it has partnered with gaming accessory maker SteelSeries to launch what both companies call "the world's first mass-market consumer eye-tracking device for gamers." SteelSeries doesn't have anything to show us just yet, but tells us that its new gaming gear will let players signal their intent, aim and express emotions inside supported games. In the meantime, we hope to catch up with Tobii when it takes to the CES floor with its EyeX Controller, giving us an insight into what its partner has in store when it launches its first eye-tracking gaming products in mid-2014.
$25 Google Glass hack uses 3D printed webcam mount to let you play Mario with your eyes
We're not entirely sure Google would give the thumbs up to everything detailed in the below video by University of Maryland PhD student, Brandyn White. But hey, any video about Google Glass that includes the phrase "you can even use a banana" will generally pique our interest. There's a lot of cool stuff in the below video, but the long and short of it is a $25 hack involving a webcam mount printed on a Formlabs Form 1 that brings pupil-tracking to Glass's portfolio of control inputs. That means an alternative control method for those times when you can't use your voice (the library, for example) or hands (the common example of climbing a tree while wearing Glass as outlined in the video). Naturally, White uses his newfound abilities to play a bit of Super Mario. That probably would have been our first choice, too, Brandyn.
Microsoft tries to patent AR glasses for multiplayer gaming
Remember those "Fortaleza" AR glasses we saw in a leaked Microsoft document back when the Xbox One was still the Xbox 720? It looks like those might actually be a thing, if a patent application from Redmond is any indication. It touts the idea of "multiplayer gaming with a head-mounted display," claiming the device could receive voice commands, track your eyes, calculate depth and recognize the faces of fellow players. All that would be in the rather narrow service of letting you invite others and accept invitations to a game through strictly visual means, though. That makes it similar to another recent Microsoft patent we saw for augmenting live events with AR, since the emphasis is on a specific usage rather than the eyewear itself. We might even see an application some day for actual gaming on such a device, but meanwhile, check after the break for more images.
Tobii and Synaptics team on eye-tracking Ultrabook concept
While Tobii has a peripheral that brings eye tracking to Windows PCs of all sorts, there's little doubt that an integrated approach would be more elegant. The company agrees: it's partnering with Synaptics on a concept Ultrabook (seen above) that combines both Gaze UI and Synaptics' pressure-sensitive ForcePad in a showcase of new input methods. The partners haven't said just what new tricks they'll demonstrate, if any, but it's clear that there won't be a size penalty when the concept is as slim as the laptops in stores today. Synaptics and Tobii plan to tour the PC throughout the industry during the summer and the fall, and they're no doubt hoping that a few vendors use the concept as inspiration.
