Controlling your device just with your eyes !! Sounds pretty cool isn't it?
“In the past year eye tracking technology moved from being a promising technology to being adopted in commercial products in a wide array of consumer segments simultaneously,” says Oscar Werner, vice president of the eye tracking company Tobii Tech. Although the concept of eye tracking isn't new but the past year saw a rising interest in the technology with many startups and roll-out of devices and software that supports eye tracking. There’s a chance that soon eye tracking will be a standard feature of a new generation of smartphones, laptops and desktop monitors setting the stage for a huge re-evaluation of the way we communicate with devices—or how they communicate with us.
Less expensive and more potent hardware, new open source software platforms and new easier and faster ways of obtaining data, used to train algorithm models, have driven the progress in eye tracking technology.
Here are some key areas which are or will be immensely effected by eye tracking technology -
1. Virtual Reality
The past year was huge for the VR sector, with major product releases such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. Since VR is all about immersion, and in this respect, eye tracking technology is likely to be a crucial component of next generation headsets.
Eye tracking is a key element in foveated rendering, the technique which allocates more resources to the area under the direct gaze of the user, and renders the rest of a frame in lower quality. The savings in memory and resources is enormous and could enable manufacturers and developers to create realistic quality graphics with much less processing power.
2.Gaming
The biggest challenge gamers have to overcome is to make their intentions known to computers and consoles. And a large part of that is to make the computer understand where we’re looking at. eye tracking has the potential to remove that hurdle, which is one of the most challenging aspects of engaging with games. Considerable efforts in the development of peripherals is allocated to easing the navigation of gaming worlds and interfaces. With eye tracking navigation and interaction with gaming interface will be as easy as looking in the direction or at the item of choice.
3.Advertising
Eye tracking can also revamp the entire advertising industry. In their current state, ads are measured by impressions, which is not a very precise metric.When eye tracking becomes an inherent part of all computing devices, ad campaigns can also take into account the amount of actual eye views that ads get. That’ll take a while to become reality, but until then, eye tracking is already showing promise in other fields where digital ads are involved.
Impax Media is using eye tracking technology along with other computer vision techniques to collect attention metrics from its proprietary in-store advertising screens, called Tru View.
As sight is perhaps the most used human sense, being able to transform it into a human-computer interaction medium can have huge implications for the future of computing.
The new paradigms may emerge where eye tracking is a fifth modality that, in combination with touch screens, mouse/touchpad, voice and keyboard, will make computers much more productive and intuitive.
Gunjan Bhatnagar
CSE, II year
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