A cool new eye-tracking technology is being applied to laptops for the first time.
At CeBIT in Germany, Tobii Technology partnered with Levono to create a laptop with integrated eye tracking control.
I was a little pessimistic about the idea at first.
We’ve covered “keyboard and mouse replacing interfaces” before, and the idea of controlling a mouse cursor seemed counter intuitive. Your eye movement generally moves ahead of actions.
It sounds like they have implemented the tech really well! The eye-tracking was designed to add functionality, not replace the keyboard and mouse. Much like adding the scroll wheel didn’t replace the right-click, but added to the existing functionality of the mouse.
The technology will track user’s eye movements in efforts to make suggestions based on where the user looks. For example, when looking at the bottom of the screen, the task bar could appear; also, if it notices that you stumble around a word, it may bring up a definition. These are just a few of the potential capabilities.
Awesome.
[via CrunchGear]
BenJPickett says
They’ve been doing eye tracking for sometime in studies to determine effective ad placement on websites, how they should be framed and how people read them in comparison to news papers. These studies were in fact a lot of the reason that people didn’t think news papers would ever be replaced by the internet. They revealed that people read websites a lot faster, they don’t read complete articles, and in fact they bounce around through the articles a lot more.
Without going into too much detail, I’m a bit surprised that something of this magnitude hasn’t been seriously looked at until now. Very exciting in all.
Eric Dye says
The idea of a task bar appearing before my mouse gets there … ya … awesome.