Forget typing and mousing. We’ve been trying for years to come up with new ways to interface with computers, be it eye-trackers, mind-reading tech or VR-powered immersive systems. And among PC Pro staff (past and present), it’s become a joke. We once even ran this headline: “Control your computer with your face and head!”
Yet here I am, typing into a laptop and staring into a monitor, just like a chump from the 1980s. But perhaps not for much longer if Apple and Google have their way, with announcements on eye-tracking plus head and face movement recognition.
Such technologies were created for people with accessibility challenges, and that’s also the origin of eye trackers and brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Hopefully, by integrating such accessibility tools into mainstream tech, iPads and other computing devices will be easier for everyone to use – even if the rest of us are still tapping around the display.
Eyes on the prize
In May, Apple announced that eye-tracking technologies would be among a range of accessibility features coming to iPads and iPhones this year. Eye Tracking, as Apple cleverly calls it, will be built into the devices, powered by on-device machine learning, and using a front-facing camera. After a quick calibration, users can navigate iOS and apps with just a look, using a feature called Dwell Control.
Eye-tracking tech has been in development for more than a century. Researchers first began trying to track eye movements in the 1870s as part of studies hoping to better understand how we read. By the end of the 1890s, a researcher called Edmund Huey had test subjects wear special contact lenses with an embedded aluminium indicator to track movement – though it was so uncomfortable enough that he apparently gave subjects cocaine to tolerate his studies.
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