Eye-tracking

Two new technologies allow a single pair of glasses to track eye movements and read the wearer's facial expressions, respectively. The systems use sonar instead of cameras, for better battery life and increased user privacy.

If you're on a sightseeing tour in a bus, you really don't want to be looking away from the passing attractions to Google them on your smartphone. The AR Interactive Vehicle Display is intended to help, by showing relevant information on the vehicle's window glass.

In fast-paced sports such as tennis, keeping your eye on the ball – and on your opponent – is essential to success. The FalconFrames wearable was designed with that fact in mind, as it's claimed to help boost its user's neuro-visual skills.

After developing hardware for computers and laptops for years, Sweden's Tobii Dynavox has now brought its eye-tracking know-how to Apple's iPad, giving a voice to folks with conditions like cerebral palsy, ALS and spinal cord injury.

We've already seen electronic glasses that watch the wearer's diet and automatically change focus, among other things. An experimental new pair monitors the user's health, lets them control games, and switch to being sunglasses as needed.

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?

​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.

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.

MSI's GT72S G Tobii gaming laptop is designed with high-end hardware, including eye-tracking technology that translates eye movements into commands for compatible apps and games.

​It may be no Michelangelo, but a robotic arm wielding a brush has completed a multi-colored oil painting at the behest of nothing other than human eyes. The system has been developed as engineers search for intuitive means of controlling robotic limbs.

Back in January Jaguar Land Rover announced its tie-in with Intel and Seeing Machines to develop eye-tracking technology that could be used prevent drowsy driving – but the firm also has other ideas for eye sensing tech that are both more mundane and more useful in day-to-day terms.

Technology is providing us with new ways to improve the way our roads are lit. Glow-in-the-dark road markings and street lights that switch on only when they detect a car are two such examples. Now, Vauxhall/Opel has unveiled a way to aim car headlights based on driver eye-tracking.