Eye Tracking Technology as Memory Aid
In a recent post we noted a meeting that took place in the French Alps ski resort of Megeve. The inaugural Augmented Human International Conference took place over two days, with a gang of engineers and scientists meeting to discuss and share research and innovations on a flurry of new technology.
Unfortunately, Eye Tracking Update wasn’t able to make it over to see the conference, but we’ve been finding plenty of articles on the goings on, and it sounds like an interesting success. And as we had hoped, there was apparently a good amount of eye tracking-related innovations present.
A team of researchers at the Telecommunications Research Center in Vienna debuted a pretty cool project. They took an eye tracker typically used for web usability studies out of the library and into the streets, hooking up the device to a person as they walked around. One camera was focused on the wearer’s eye, while the other was turned on the observed scene. The device was then hooked up to a smart phone with a built-in compass and GPS, so that the wearer could transmit their orientation and exact location. The researchers then added sensors that indicated whether the subject was looking up or down and attached the entire rig to a bicycle helmet.
As the wearer made their way through the streets, he could close his eyes for two seconds, triggering a request for information about the building, bridge, or monument standing before him. The sustained blink would then signal a remote computer equipped with a geo-referenced database (think Google Earth) and could forward the requested information back to the wanderer’s cell phone.
In an effort to make the device as non-intrusive as possible, researchers used a text-to-speech engine, and information was received through an earpiece alongside the bicycle helmet.
The device is still being developed, but apparently worked without a hitch.
A few other proof of concept pieces were introduced at the conference, including an eye tracking device adapted to work as a memory aid. The idea, while functional, is still a long way from commercial development, but sounds pretty exciting nonetheless. A team at the University of Tokyo used tiny infrared sensors to monitor blink rate, pinpointing a face, book cover, or really any object within the field of vision. But instead of trolling the web for information about the selected object, data is transferred to a program that draws information from a “hand-tailored database of images and files, sometimes called a personal lifelog.”
One hundred images were registered as part of the database and when the eye was focused on a certain subject representing one of the images within the database, the computer could recognize it and the corresponding file was located and extracted.
Take a look around the web to find more information on the conference; hopefully it picks up momentum and you never know – next year we may be reporting from the slopes of the French Alps.