Eye-tracking

For some time now, the tracking of eye movements has served as a means of assessing neurological health. A new system is said to do so more precisely than ever, providing highly accurate readings in just 10 seconds.

Video-camera-equipped glasses may show you what the wearer's head is pointing at, but they certainly don't indicate what the person's gaze is actually fixed upon. A new headset is designed to do just that, however, and it could be used to advance a number of technologies.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has delivered a Breakthrough Device Designation to a novel eye-tracking technology that claims to offer objective and early diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. The FDA designation is hoped to accelerate the approval process for the test offering clinicians a new and reliable way to diagnose the degenerative disease at its earliest stage.

In the age of wearable computers, scientists in the laboratories of DARPA, Google, and universities around the world see contact lenses not as tools to improve our vision, but as opportunities to augment the human experience. But how? And why?

​We've seen it in movies many times before … the reluctant witness who looks right at the mug shot of the murderer, and falsely claims that they don't know him. Soon, however, police could know if such people are lying – by watching their eyes.

Presbyopia is a common form of age-induced far-sightedness. Now a Stanford team has developed a pair of high-tech specs called autofocals, which use fluid-filled lenses, depth-sensing cameras and eye-tracking technology to make sure whatever a wearer is looking at stays sharp.

At CES 2019, HTC has unveiled the Vive Pro Eye, which adds eye-tracking to last year’s high-end hardware, and the Vive Cosmos, which turns the tracking inside out. On top of that, HTC has outlined software updates to its content subscription service and something called the “Vive Reality System.”

​Eye-tracking systems certainly would add a lot to augmented reality glasses, but their integration into such eyewear has been limited because they require so much power. That said, scientists have now developed eye-tracking glasses powered by nothing but onboard solar cells.

​When it comes to human-machine interfaces, it would certainly help if computers could get a sense of what sort of people they were dealing with, so they could tailor their responses accordingly. Well, computers in the future may be able to do so, simply by watching how users move their eyes.

​For people who cannot speak, nor move their arms, hands or even heads, computer-connected eye-tracking systems allow for communications via eye movements. Such systems have some drawbacks, however, which a new prototype headset is claimed to address.

VR is great at immersing us in gigantic worlds that seem to go on forever – until you bump into the living room wall. Now computer scientists have developed a system that tricks you into walking around in circles in the real world, while thinking you’re moving longer distances in the virtual world.

The latest HTC Vive accessory promises to bring much-needed eye tracking technology to VR. The Chinese startup 7invensun, fueled by some of HTC’s venture capital, has launched an upgrade kit known as aGlass that claims to bring foveated rendering and real-time eye control to the Vive experience.