New tech may let you control phone with your eyes

Boston, July 2: Scientists, including one of Indian origin, are developing a new mobile software that can accurately identify where a person is looking in real time, an advance that may lead smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices to be controlled by eye movements.

In an effort to make eye tracking cheap, compact and accurate enough to be included in smartphones, researchers are crowdsourcing the collection of gaze information and using it to teach mobile software how to figure out where a person is looking in.

The researchers at Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of Georgia in the US, have so far been able to train software to identify where a person is looking with an accuracy of about a centimetre on a mobile phone and 1.7 centimetres on a tablet.

“It's still not exact enough to use for consumer applications,” said Aditya Khosla, a graduate student at MIT. However, he believes the system's accuracy will improve with more data.

The technology has been expensive and has required hardware that has made it tricky to add the capability to gadgets like phones and tablets. It could make eye tracking a lot more widespread and also be helpful as a way to let you play games or navigate your smartphone without having to tap or swipe.