03.21.06

eye trackers

Posted in Random thoughts, Technology trends at 10:46 pm by ducky

As I mentioned before, webcams have proliferated to the point where I’ve seen some built in to computers, and this makes me wonder if they could be used for eye trackers.

Apparently the best eye trackers bounce an infra-red beam off of your cornea, and use the location of the IR spot to tell where you are looking. Some hearsay that says that the IR can damage the eyes, so maybe I wouldn’t want IR pointing at my eyeballs the whole time I’m on my computer.

However, webcams are so cheap that heck, use two! I somehow think that being able to triangulate would help.

If you could do good passive eye tracking, there are cool things you could do, like depth-of-field. Imagine you’re playing a computer game, and the stuff in the distance is sharp when you are looking at it and blurry when you are looking at things in the foreground. How cool would that be?

Comments

  1. Sophie said,

    April 19, 2006 at 2:56 pm

    this entry gave me an idea i pitched to the robotics team for a project to help improve one of our mentor’s paralysed friends quality of life… thanks! And i would totally buy one of those games.