The Snowball Effect: Advances in Eye Tracking
Technological innovation is cyclical. A problem arises, a solution is determined, and an invention is created. New creations lead to even more innovations as people play off each other’s inventions, fixing them and finding better, more efficient approaches for some of the details that the original may have overlooked. Take the car, for example. A car is invented, and this leads to an entirely new slew of inventions – accessories and smaller solutions for the larger product. Apple is another example, and you only need to walk around an Apple store to see the load of newer products to accessorize or enhance the original Apple product.
Eye Tracking is no different. A group of engineering students at Brigham Young University just created a solution for one of the more frustrating aspects of eye tracking – an eye tracker’s inability to adjust focus for the wearer’s movements. When a young user moves around or an adult has to sit down and get situated each time they want to use the computer, many eye trackers cannot accommodate for subtle changes in body positioning. After noticing this problem, Robert Chappell, president of Eye Teck Digital Systems, a company that sells eye tracking devices, rang up BYU when he saw an ad matching teams of engineering students with companies seeking technical solutions.
According to an article published in the Salt Lake Tribune last week, Chappell didn’t have enough manpower to work on the problem and would have had to put it on the backburner. But after working with the graduate students, Chappell had a fix.
The students managed to figure out how to continually refocus the lens by employing a pair of eyeglasses manufactured by Zoom Focus Eyewear. The glasses feature a lens, which was awarded with a 2009 Best of What’s New Award for the health category in Popular Science magazine.
The spectacles are actually composed of two lenses – a flexible one and a firm one. The flexible lens is nearest the eye and is equipped with a transparent membrane attached to a clear and rigid surface. Between the two lenses lays a small amount of clear fluid. The glasses work as the wearer slides a gauge attached to the bridge, pushing the fluid around and effectively changing the shape of the flexible lens. As the lens changes shape, so does the correction, focusing the lens at any distance.
Additional research could lead to the commercialization of the product, says Chappell in the Tribune’s article.
Pretty interesting stuff, and it just goes to show that new innovation tends to snowball, making for not just one, but a number of new creative progressions.
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