In the middle of playing with tablets and laptops at Computex , we have not been thinking much of eye-tracking technologies until we saw Utechzone’s booth. What we’ve here’s the Spring, a TW$240,000 (US$8,380) eye-tracking rig that was launched in March 2010 and is aimed toward users with limited mobility. The package includes an LCD monitor, a pc, and an external sensor that utilizes infrared to trace our pupils. Also included is an eye fixed-friendly software suite that lets users play games, browse the internet and media files, send emails, communicate with caretakers, and browse PDF or TXT files.
We had a go at the Spring and quickly learned tips on how to control it with our eyes: very like the Xbox Kinect , with the intention to make a click we needed to hover the cursor over (or fix our eyes on) a desired button until the previous completes a spin. The tracking was surprisingly accurate, except we needed to take off our glasses for it to work; that said, the opposite glasses didn’t exhibit an identical issue, so the culprit can be just a few coating on our lenses. Another problem we found was that it only took a fast jiggle with our eyes to cancel the spinning countdown, so full concentration is needed to take advantage of the Spring. This just isn’t an issue outside a loud event like Computex, anyway, and if you would like more convincing, we were told that a disabled Taiwanese professor managed to hit 100,000 Chinese characters within three months using phonetic input at the an identical rig — he’s planning on releasing a brand new book soon. Take a look at our eyes-on video after the break for a higher idea on how the Spring works.
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