Dual scene-camera head-mounted eye tracking rig from Lancaster Uni.

From the Pervasive 2012 conference held last week in Newcastle comes a demo of a dual scene-camera head-mounted eye tracking rig that enables users to move objects between two displays using the gaze position. The larger display acts as the "public" display (digital signage etc.) while the smaller represents the personal handheld tablet/smartphone. Nifty idea from Jayson Turner, Andreas Bulling and Hans Gellersen, all from the Embedded Interactive Systems group at Lancaster University. 

The Eye Tribe presents worlds first eye controlled Windows 8 tablet

It slices, it dices! The Eye Tribe from Copenhagen introduces the worlds first Windows 8 eye tracking tablet. The small, lightweight add-on connects via USB, no additional cables or batteries needed. For the time being the specs are 30Hz, accuracy of 0.5 degrees and an exceptionally large tracking range. More info to follow.

 


The Eye Tribe, formerly known as Senseye, have made significant progress in recent months. In January they won the Danish Venture Cup. Then went on to participate in the Rice RBPC, the worlds premier business plan competition, made it to the semi-finals and was awarded "Most Disruptive Technology" while being mentioned in Fortune Magazine and Houston Chronicle. In May the team won the eHealth Innovation Contest followed by the audience award at the Danish Accelerace whereby they were selected to participate at the Tech All Stars event which gives the most promising European startups the opportunity to pitch at the LeWeb conference in London on June 20th.

Eyecatcher - A 3D prototype combining Eyetracking with a Gestural Camera

Eyecatcher is a prototype combining eyetracking with a gestural camera on a dual screen setup. Created for the Oilrig process industry, this project was a collaborative exploration between ABB Corporate Research and Interactive Institute Umeå (blog).

Copenhagen Business School: PhD position available

Copenhagen Business School invites applications for a vacant PhD scholarship in empirical modeling of eye movements in reading, writing and translation. The PhD position is offered at the Department of International Business Communication at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS). The Department of International Business Communication is a new department at CBS whose fields of interest include the role of language(-s) in interlingual and intercultural communication, the role of language and culture competences in organizations, the role of language and culture in communication technology and social technologies, as well as the teaching of language skills. The Department is dedicated to interdisciplinary and problem-oriented research. Considerable progress has been made in eye-tracking technology over the past decade, allowing to capture  gaze behavior with free head movements. However, the imprecision of the measured signal makes it difficult to analyze the eye-gaze movement in reading tasks where a precise local resolution of the gaze samples is required to track the reader's gaze path over a text. The PhD position will investigate methods to cancel out the noise from the gaze signal. The PhD candidate will investigate, design and implement empirically-based models of eye-gaze movements in reading which take into account physical properties of the visual system in addition to background information, such as the purpose of the reading activity, the structure of the text, the quality of the gaze signal, etc. The PhD candidate should have: an interest in cognitive modeling of human reading, writing and translation processes a basic understanding of browser and eye-tracking technology knowledge of probability theory and statistical modeling advanced programming skills More information available here.

Temporal Control In the EyeHarp Gaze-Controlled Musical Interface

The EyeHarp that I wrote about last summer is a gaze controlled musical instrument build by Zacharias Vamvakousis. In the video below he demonstrates how the interface is driven by the ITU Gaze Tracker and used to compose a loop which then improvise upon. On the hardware side a modified PS3 camera is used in combination with two infrared light sources. This setup was presented in New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2012) conference in Detroit a week ago, while it will be exhibited in Sonar, Barcelona on 14-16, June 2012. Great to see that such innovative interface being made open source and combined with the ITU tracker.

• Vamvakousis, Z. and Ramirez, R. (2012) Temporal Control In the EyeHarp Gaze-Controlled Musical Interface. In the proceedings on the 12th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. 21-23 May 2012. Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. (PDF)