Laptops to Accept Your Eye Command


Bangalore: Tech giants around the world believe that motion control is the future of computing. With the invention of Nintendo’s Wii which is a gaming console with a wireless remote by which you can control a computer by just waving your hands, the belief of the tech giants become reality. Microsoft’s Kinect which analysis motion and have a whole new experience to gamers and the recently launched iPhone 4S with a voice assistance computing named Siri are other notable examples in this field.

All such innovative techs are around us making computing better and easy, but now the technology is focusing on a new field in the space of motion control technology called ‘Eye Tracking’. This technology is not new, it’s available in militaries and in some specialized industries for disabled peoples, but it has a huge cost.

Last month at CES 2012, a company called Tobii, demonstrated a new laptop with built-in eye tracking sensor. This system will detect where you are looking with pinpoint accuracy. To use this eye tracking, first the system learns where your eyes are looking by using a 10 seconds calibration process, this process is by a simple test, in which you just have to look at an orange dot on the laptop screen which jumps around the screen.

The company has shown a demo of this eye tracking sensor by implementing it on Google Maps, it automatically focuses and Zooms in and out wherever you focus and you can even scroll the page too. The company also showed a slide show app, where you see the thumbnails of many photos and it automatically blows up to full screen when you focus on any thumbnail.

The demo goes further; it was amazing when they showed the demo of running Windows 8, clicking the toolbar button, opened the world doc and scrolling the pace automatically just by the gaze.

Tobii is marketing this eye tracking sensor to computer manufacturers and Lenovo is the first to show off the prototype of an eye controlled laptop in CES 2012, and it might be the first company to bring this tech to the market in a couple of years.