Santa's been spotted - Introducing the SMI Glasses

What a year it has been in the commercial eye tracking domain. In June we had the Tobii glasses which was their entry into the head-mounted market which created some buzz online. This was followed by a high-speed remote system, the Tobii TX300, which was introduced in November. Both products competed directly with the offering from SMI which countered with the RED500 remote tracker, surpassing the Tobii system by 200 samples per second. Today it's my pleasure to introduce the SMI Glasses which brings up the competition a couple of notches. Being comparable in the neat, unobtrusive form factor they provide binocular tracking with a direct view of both eyes.

Rendered image of the upcoming SMI Glasses.

The small scene camera is located in the center of glasses which gives minimal parallax. Although the hard specs has yet to be released it is rumored to have a high resolution scene camera, long battery lifetime and an advanced IR AOA marker detection system which enables automatic mapping of gaze data to real-world objects. Furthermore, they can be used not only as blackbox system – but may be integrated with SMIs current head mounted devices, including live view, open interface for co-registration etc. Estimated availability is projected to the first half of 2011.

Thanks for all the hard work, inspiration and feedback throughout 2010, it's been an amazing year. By the looks of it 2011 appears to be a really interesting year for eye tracking. I'd like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.