The Tobii EyeMobile allows for completely hands-free access to Windows 8 Pro tablets. The ability to navigate, control and access apps, Internet, music, e-books, social media, games and more through the simple, natural and relaxed movement of the eyes, allowing them to live richer, more connected and independent lives. With Tobii Gaze Selection and its Windows 8 Functions Overlay, touch gestures, various click types, taps, side swipes, as well as accessing, are done using only your eyes.
The Tobii PCEye Go is an extremely flexible eye tracker that connects via a single USB cable to the tablet. The same Tobii PCEye Go that is used in the EyeMobile can also be used on a desktop or laptop computer, giving you maximum freedom of choice wherever you go.
Beneath it is a small, hot dog-sized black sensor bar, which uses two infrared cameras to locate the exact position of your eyes with incredible precision and speed. It connects to the Surface (or any Windows 8 tablet) via USB.
Tobii wants to bring eye-tracking tech into the picture as well. The company is partnering with SteelSeries to launch a gaming peripheral that lets you manipulate gameplay by simply moving your eyes.
Learning how to control a tablet with only your eyes isn’t the easiest thing. As much as Tobii would like, Windows is still built around touch input, so to make it work, the Tobii app has to teach you how to make your eyes work more like a mouse or finger. This takes some time to get used to, but for those who may want, or need, to use a computer or mobile device without their hands, learning is no obstacle.
Tobii’s interface starts with a black and blue bar that sits on the right (unless you’re doing something on the right side of the screen, in which case it would move to the left). This black bar has several functions on it like left mouse click, right mouse click, keyboard, settings, and menu. By looking at any one of them for just a second (or a fraction of a second), you activate them. Let’s start with the overlay.
In this demo from CES 2014, the Eye Tribe’s Anders Bo Pedersen has a go on popular mobile game Fruit Ninja, which is typically played by using your finger to swipe fruit. That sensor, which is mounted below a PC’s monitor, uses a single camera and three infrared lights to track a person’s eyes. The camera looks for the reflections of the lights off of a person’s pupils to determine the direction of his gaze. A short calibration exercise done the first time someone uses the device determines which gaze corresponds to which onscreen positions.
References:
- Eye controlled this tablet without touching it! (www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/)
- CES 2014: Eye-Tracking Game Controller for PCs Launching This Summer (www.technologyreview.com/)
- Tobii EyeMobile (www.tobii.com/)