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The Power of Eye Tracking Technology
Happy Monday, all! I thought some of you might be interested in this article on Fast Company about eye tracking. I was able to test out some eye-tracking software earlier this year as part of a video game survey and it was pretty cool—if you’re not familiar with eye tracking, it allows you to interact with technology using only your eyes. Depending on the technology, you can move a cursor, type, or even interact with a video game.
The article talks about the benefits of eye tracking for the general public, from proofreading to communicating with colleagues in something like Google Docs. This quote sums things up pretty well: “The experiments show how using your eyes as a tool to control a computer could make everyone more productive, not just people who are disabled. It’s an example of the power of inclusive design: When technologies are built to accommodate users who have disabilities, everyone else benefits, too.”
If you’ve used eye-tracking before, what did you think of it?
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4 Replies
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I find eye tracking almost useless for me. I’m one of the rare group who can’t seem to tolerate the infrared pulsating light spectrum in my eyeballs. After a few minutes of use (I use the Tobii 4c) I start to feel dizzy and lightheaded, so I can’t seem to use it long enough to actually learn how to make any real use of it. The few times I tried to click on things with my eyesight, or to try to type something by looking at the on-screen keyboard, it seems very flaky at best and would have a steep learning curve in order to get good at this. Unfortunately, I am getting to the point where I need something like this because I cannot use a traditional mouse for more than a few minutes at a time, and my voice is getting too weak for even Dragon NaturallySpeaking to understand me good enough. I am holding out hope for brainwave tracking becoming a real thing very soon!
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Sorry to hear it didn’t work for you, Robert! I totally hear you on it being flaky. I didn’t play with it for that long, but even I got the sense that it’d take a lot of training and finesse to make it worthwhile. Fingers crossed they get brainwave tracking up to speed!
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I found Dragon to not work well for me either. It’s partly due to my unusual/weak voice, but also because of all of Dragon’s built-in commands that can’t be disabled, which give it too many choices to make when trying to recognize your speech and leads to many misrecognitions.
Instead, I basically wrote my own speech recognition software that is simpler and works much better for me. It operates more as voice-driven keyboard, where you spell out each word (with the NATO alphabet or something like it), plus a mouse mode. Other commands can also be added, but that is more complicated.
It’s hacked together, not a polished product, and it takes some work to set up, but I could help you if you’re interested. It currently requires Windows.
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I’m surprised that you have so much trouble with reliably using the Tobii 4C. I have used the Tobii EyeX on a Surface Pro tablet for the past 2 years, and just upgraded to the 4C on Sunday. I love both of them (don’t see a huge difference between the two) and use it every morning while doing my breathing treatment, which now takes way longer because I’m so occupied! I use Optikey with it to get the mouse and keyboard functions and spend most of my time with emails, Facebook, searching the web, etc… The only two things I typically save for the evenings (when I’m on my laptop instead) are when I have something longer than 2 paragraphs to type or Photoshop projects.
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