Will You Buy an Eye Tracking Smartphone?
Apple’s iPhone fiasco (I think some have called it Antennagate?) has garnered a lot of media coverage in the past couple weeks, and lately it seems not a day passes that we don’t read something somewhere about the latest, greatest smart phone. As various state laws pass curtailing the use of phone and text applications while driving, some new ways of operating cell phones have come to the front. Eye tracking, it seems, is one of them.
Nokia, the mobile handset giant, is developing an eye tracking application for their phones, as is Apple (we’ve written about Apple’s purchase of a number of Tobii units). Are these companies embracing eye tracking, giving consumers that ability to accurately browse and navigate websites and user interfaces without physically touching the screen?
Nokia is apparently working on a mobile phone that operates with only the gaze of the eye – the Gaze Tracker. A prototype of this technology has already been developed and is on display at their company headquarters in Sweden (we wrote about this recently as well). According to representatives, a Gaze Tracker user only need put on an armband and place an earpiece near their ear to read their messages in the device. The phone would need to be calibrated to the user’s eye and the rest is apparently a piece of cake.
Another eye tracking endeavor for phones is being developed by researchers at Dartmouth, and they’re calling it the “EyePhone.” The software they’re developing is meant to provide accessibility to those who have difficulty with fine motor control. The software has been developed for Nokia again, using the front-facing camera in one of their models to shoot a constant stream of video of the user’s face. Software analyzes the face, finding the location of the eyes, and then chooses a particular eye to track, localizing its gaze and determining what part of the screen is currently being viewed. A user can use gaze in a particular direction to highlight different areas, trigger a program launch, and – of course – make a call.
Rather than tracking the angle of the eye, the EyePhone’s software tracks the relative position of the users’ eyes to the screen, so the user needs to move their head in order to move the cursor around the screen.
These are all prototypes for now, but we hope to see some of these technologies begin to roll out into the marketplace soon enough.
Eye-tracking software for mobile phones on the anvil
Related articles: