Tobii Tech Eye Tracking at Siggraph
August 2012, At Siggraph, Tobii Tech was showing both their consumer version eye tracking hardware solution and the professional market product that is applicable for gaming, medical and CAD applications. The booth was displaying a new technology that fits in small form factor and is low power enough to be used in laptop, tablet and some larger cell phone products. The company, founded in 2001, has been focusing on research and usability studies for eye tracking functions in computing applications for consumers and also in rehabilitation as an assisted operation device.
Tobii Tech IS-2 Eye Tracker
The use of eye tracking is an enhancement to the growing number of sensors that are interfacing with the user. This methodology, however does not require any learning curve, rather it eliminates steps in the computer operation process and returns them to a “natural function” experience. The preview product they were showing was integrated into two applications – a retrofitted arcade “asteroids” game that had no buttons and used eye tracking to play and an prototype Lenovo laptop that had the pen sized eye tracking module integrated into the device below the display.
In the laptop application, the eye position data is reported to the program in lieu of mouse control data to select windows, scroll applications and content creation/editing functions. The two most natural applications tested by M&E Tech editor Lidia Paulinska-Thompson at the show were reading a PDF document and Word Doc and having a hands free experience to auto scroll the screen based on when her eyes hit the bottom the content window. The second was the laptop version of the Arcade game that utilized the position of her gaze to identify the targets for the firing of the central “ship”. This tracking includes selection of active windows in Win7 as to which activity to operate on.
The hardware solution has its own CPU, a fixed eye separation and custom firmware to do all of the tracking analysis so just the position data is output. The unit can currently scan at 30hz providing real time position and is supported by a full SDK for developers. The SDK allows the programmer to have access to some of the internal data that is generated by the unit, in addition to the position data.
The goal for the new form factor device, is to make eye tracking as ubiquitous as gesture for mobile devices and expand through not only computing devices, but also display devices that can benefit for active management of the knowledge of the viewer.
