Jew World Order

At CES this year, Tobii, which has been making technology that watches what you’re looking at on a screen, is showing off its gaze-controlled demo laptop and introducing its eye-control interface for Windows 8.

We first met Barbara Barclay, general manager of Tobii North America, at the D9 conference last June, and we had a talk about our reservations over eye control. On paper, this technology is incredibly cool and sci-fi-ish, but our issue is this: we use our eyes to see, not to control. There’s a big cognitive difference between looking at something on a screen and touching it (or mousing to it). Eyes are input devices, not output. That’s why gaze tracking for analytics makes sense. But for controlling a computer interface?

We sat with Barclay and Tobii’s Anders Olsson at CES today, and got to try the latest from Tobii. One of the key tenets with the Windows 8 demo is that it uses a combination of touch and eyesight for the interface. To select a tile to launch, for example, you press down the Windows key, look at the tile for the app you want, and then release the key. That ameliorates the issue of having your computer go off and do something when your mind or gaze wanders. It is easier to look at something on a screen than it is to mouse over it, in terms of actual speed and effort, so this should work.

This Frankenstein laptop has two Tobii IR emitters and cameras mounted below the screen.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Tobii works by shooting near-infrared lights at your eyes, and then uses two IR cameras to capture “the reflective point of retina, plus the glint off the cornea”, we were told. From this, it builds a 3D model of your eye. Tobii requires new hardware compared to the cameras in PCs now; we saw the demo on a custom-built machine that used to be an HP laptop. No word yet on what the premium will be for the technology. When touchscreens first came out on laptops, the premium for that technology was a few hundred dollars.

In our rushed demo at a casino cafe, we found that it actually does work. The Tobii system knows where you’re looking, and provides some feedback on that, but it doesn’t actually do anything until you press or release a control. We didn’t expect to like it, but we did. It is intuitive to use, and very fast. Tobii has done a good job of making your glances into workable input signals.

Via CNET