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Eye-tracking mouse pointer

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Given that laptops generally have a camera sitting idle, why not use it for tracking eye movement? Press a designated key, and the mouse pointer jumps to wherever you're looking (hopefully not the keyboard). Doesn't need to be accurate - just accurate enough to get the pointer roughly where you want it.
MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 12 2015

Tobii https://en.wikipedi...ki/Tobii_Technology
[Inyuki, Oct 12 2015]

Golan Levine Art that looks back at you. TED 2009 http://www.ted.com/...golan_levin_ted2009
[pashute, Oct 13 2015]

[link]






       Yeah, exactly, [MaxwellBuchanan]... How can we use the camera to achieve the same functionality and quality like with the Tobii (link)?
Inyuki, Oct 12 2015
  

       Department store display windows ?   

       Use a camera to see where people are looking, and than do something so that the sidewalk is full of people and police have to be called to do crowd control.   

       "Yes, sir it is very cute manikin, but you can't block pedestrian traffic."   

       ------   

       Phones have the camera on the wrong side for this "eye tracking mouse pointer" So you will need a snap on 180 mirror so it can see the phone users eyeballs. Get the laptop version working first, but there are a lot of phones out there.   

       ------   

       Or you could track the mouth smile up, frown down, tongue visible - right, tongue hidden - left cough - enter   

       Such users would appear crazy and be fun to watch.
popbottle, Oct 12 2015
  

       [+] although laptop cameras are generally not fast enough for eye invoked mouse tracking. The Bar Ilan brain lab I managed had special hardware for that.   

       Then again there was Golan Levine that did something with regular laptop cameras back in 2009. (Link to TED talk in this Halfbakery idea Links section)
pashute, Oct 13 2015
  

       //laptop cameras are generally not fast enough for eye invoked mouse tracking.//   

       They don't have to be. We are not asking the mouse pointer to follow your gaze. I am saying that, when you hit a given key combination, the computer captures an image and works out where you're looking. A 100ms delay would not be a disastrophe.
MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 13 2015
  

       //laptop cameras are generally not fast enough for eye invoked mouse tracking//   

       But they could be at almost nil cost. Build it and they will come as it were - if the software appeared and was popular enough, the next generation of pads, phones and laptops would have a camera specced to optimise it's use.
Custardguts, Oct 14 2015
  

       I am still pretty sure that current cameras are good enough. As I mentioned, we don't need realtime tracking - just the ability to take a snapshot when a keyboard key is pressed, and figure out the gaze direction within, say, 100ms. I would be dumbfounded if that's not possible with existing hardware.
MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 14 2015
  

       My memory of this is that there are lots of open source projects to do pupil and/or random-point-on-face- tracking but not to track the difference between the reflection from the front and back of your eye which is the really accurate but proprietary kind.   

       I also wonder if they program physics into this so that it is not just a one to one correspondence between your face or eye and the mouse pointer but there is some kind of intelligent or other-body-part-(say foot)-based capture and release and the equivalent of friction or gravity.
JesusHChrist, Oct 14 2015
  

       Our eyes focus on a 3 degree cone. The rest is periphery.   

       But, that means, you really can't get better than a 3 degree (~5mm on the nearby screen) accuracy just from looking at my eyes.   

       Perhaps this could be combined with minor head cues. So, you focus on the screen and a 5mm translucent pointer shows where it thinks you're looking, and then you make very minor head tilts (0.05 degree in x-y) and the 5mm pointer moves that way & gets smaller.
sophocles, Oct 15 2015
  
      
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