Now, Control Your Smartphone With Your Eyes | TechTree.com

Now, Control Your Smartphone With Your Eyes

The windows to your soul, now the key to your phone?

 
Now, Control Your Smartphone With Your Eyes

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Georgia, and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany, has been engaged in developing a software that allows a user to control a smartphone or tablet through eye movements.

So far, MIT Technology Review says, they have been able to train the software to identify where a user is looking, achieving accuracy of about 1 centimetre on a smartphone and about 1.7 centimetres on a tablet.

The researchers created an app called GazeCapture that gathered data about how people look at their phones in different environments outside the confines of a lab.

As they were shown pulsating dots on a smartphone screen, the users’ gazes were recorded using the phone’s front camera. To make sure they were paying attention, they were then shown a dot with an “L” or “R” inside it, and they had to tap the left or ride side of the screen in response.

The information thus collected using GazeCapture  was used to train a software called iTracker, which can also run on an iPhone. The phone’s camera captures your face, and the software considers factors like the position and direction of your head and eyes to deduce where on the screen your gaze is focused.

The study’s co-author, Aditya Khosla from MIT, says that the software’s accuracy will improve with time and more data.

About 1,500 people have used the GazeCapture app so far. Khosla added that if the researchers can get data from 10,000 people, they’ll be able to reduce iTracker’s error rate to half a centimetre, which should be accurate enough for a range of eye-tracking applications.

The results of the study were presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Seattle, Washington, in June. Khosla further added that the software could potentially also be used in medical diagnoses, especially to diagnose conditions such as concussions and even schizophrenia.


Tags : Smartphone Innovation

 
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