eye tracking

Detecting schizophrenia: The eyes have it

More than a century ago, doctors first realized that people with psychotic illnesses also suffer from impaired eye movements. Now researchers out of the University of Aberdeen in the U.K. have taken that observation and truly put it to the test with high resolution cameras and video software.

The result: a computer model based on a series of simple eye-tracking trials that has distinguished schizophrenics from healthy control subjects with 98.3 percent accuracy.

"It has been known for over 100 years that individuals with psychotic illnesses have a variety of eye movement abnormalities, but until our study, … Read more

Eye-popping illusion lets you write with gaze alone

Last month, a paralyzed man sent his first tweet using eye movements. A new technology out of France could allow him not only to type, but to draw and sign his name in cursive on a computer.

The technique, described in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, relies on a novel head-mounted display that uses a camera to track eye movements and then relays that movement data to a computer.

Discovered by a Paris scientist studying optical illusions, the technique tricks the neuromuscular machinery into overcoming a natural phenomenon known as saccadic eye movements. … Read more

Hey, look! Lenovo's got an eye-controlled laptop

When we first heard about Lenovo's new eye-controlled laptop, we worried that we'd have to stop winking at our monitors every time Justin Bieber popped up in our browser--or risk a seriously messy desktop. Fortunately, the eye-tracking technology is reportedly highly accurate and probably wouldn't be overly sensitive to our odd little tics.

The functional laptop prototype, being demonstrated this week at the CeBit tech fair in Hannover, Germany, lets you point, select, and scroll with your eyes alone. With a stare, for example, you can make a cursor appear, zoom in on pictures or maps, or switch between open windows and browse e-mails and documents. To increase battery life, the computer can auto-dim and brighten the screen when it recognizes your peepers. Also, as demonstrated at CeBit, gamers can glance to pull off actions like burning up incoming asteroids.

The laptop tracks eye movements by shining infrared lights into the user's eyes; hidden cameras then detect the glint in the retinas. The system needs to be adjusted to fit each individual user and works for those with or without eyeglasses. … Read more

Google knows where your eyeballs go

On a recent trip to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., I got a quick peek at one of the test rooms Google uses to track user interactions with its products. Gmail's product manager Todd Jackson told me it was just one of the many other user testing facilities the company had, and that collectively the testing had given the team important feedback of how people were using Gmail. Enough to change where entire features like user chat took up residence on a user's screen.

This Friday Google unveiled results from using this technique on some of … Read more

Eye-tracker lets you get location information by staring

Someday soon, you might be able to figure out where you are in the world by staring.

Researchers from South Korea's Yonsei University will present a paper at the International Solid State Circuits Conference next week on a system that spits out two-dimensional coordinates for the object or place that a person is focusing on. The same group has worked on several eye interfaces in the past, mostly for people with disabilities. By integrating eye interfaces with GPS information, users can apparently get geographic information. The group presents its paper on Monday, February 3.

ISSCC is one of the … Read more

Future of Search: 2010... A Search Odyssey

Search (or more precisely the search results) is undergoing some of the greatest changes we've ever seen with the influence of local search, mobile search, personalization, and universal search. Search marketers and site owners alike are bouncing between wild speculation and frantic contemplation of how search will change and what impact those changes will have.

Who better to turn to on the topic of search results than Gord Hotchkiss and his team at Enquiro. Now famous for their eye tracking studies revealing the infamous "Golden Triangle" and F-shaped patterns of user scanning of SERPs, Enquiro takes a … Read more