Mirametrix acquired by TandemLaunch Technologies

MONTREAL (Quebec), February 18, 2011 – TandemLaunch Technologies today announced that it has completed the acquisition of all assets and staff of Vancouver-based Mirametrix Research Inc., a privately held provider of gaze tracking technology. Mirametrix is a technology company offering affordable gaze tracking systems for application in vision research and content analytics. The technology acquired through Mirametrix complements TandemLaunch’s consumer gaze tracking portfolio. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

“Mirametrix is an innovative small company that has successfully introduced gaze tracking solutions for cost-competitive applications. TandemLaunch offers the resources to scale the Mirametrix business and ultimately bring gaze tracking into the consumer market” said Helge Seetzen, CEO of TandemLaunch.

The website has been updated revealing the new executive team, product offering appears to remain the same for the time being. Helge Seetzen (blog) is an entrepreneur who sold his previous company, BrightSide, to Dolby Technologies for ~$30 million which he invested into the TandemLaunch incubator which focuses on early stages in technology development with the aim bring in industry partners to acquire the technology for further commercialization (interview). 

Congrats to Craig Hennessey, founder of Mirametrix, who is now well on his way to commercialize his PhD research (1, 2) on remote eye tracking based on a single camera setup, bright pupil and corneal reflections. It will be interesting to see how additional resources backing the operation will affects the industry and what role an affordable but perhaps less accurate system has to play. The latter can be improved upon but what about the market, will an affordable system expand or create new segments? From the top of my head, Yes. Time will tell..

EyeTech Digital Systems @ GDC2011

Valve Eye Controlled Portal 2

Source PCGamer.

CUShop concept @ Clemson University

"Clemson University architecture students are working with the packaging science department in designing an eye tracking lab to be a fully immersive grocery store shopping experience. This concept explores the entrance into the lab through a vestibule space created by two sliding glass doors, mimicking the space found in many grocery stores."

Accurate eye center localisation for low-cost eye tracking

Fabian Timm from the Lübeck University Institute for Neuro and Bioinformatics demonstrate a "novel approach for accurate localisation of the eye centres (pupil) in real time. In contrast to other approaches, we neither employ any kind of machine learning nor a model scheme - we just compute dot products! Our method computes very accurate estimations and can therefore be used in real world applications such as eye (gaze) tracking." Sounds great, any ideas on gaze estimation and accuracy?

Head-mounted eye-tracking application for driving

Nicolas Schneider have for his masters thesis modified the ITU Gaze Tracker for eye tracking in an automotive setting. It incorporates a scene camera and software that calibrates and integrates it in the platform. The project was carried out at Schepens Eye Research Institute at Harvard and there is a good chance it will be released open source. A fine piece of work and an awesome addition to the framework. We're impressed by the results. More info to follow, for now enjoy this video.

• Nicolas Schneider, Peter Bex, Erhardt Barth, and Michael Dorr. 2011. An open-source low-cost eye-tracking system for portable real-time and offline tracking. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Novel Gaze-Controlled Applications (NGCA '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 8 , 4 pages. (Full text: PDF Online)