Fujitsu tablet and monitor

Today the first public demonstrations of the Fujitsu/Docomo/Tobii tablet came online, all from the CEATEC 2012 expo in Japan. The prototype tablet, called iBeam, is designed by Fujitsu for Docomo and contains an eye tracking module from Swedish Tobii, namely the IS-20 which was introduced earlier this year. The form factor appears a bit on the large size with a bump towards the edge where the eye tracking module is placed, sort of looks like a tablet inside another case. On the software side the tablet is running Android where a gaze marker is overlaid on the interface. Selection is performed using simple dwell activation which is known for being both stressful and error-prone. The sample apps contains the usual suspects, panning of photos and maps, scrolling browser and image viewer. Pretty neat for a prototype.

Fujitsu also demonstrated a LCD monitor with an eye tracking camera system embedded while the actual gaze estimation algorithms are running on an embedded Windows computer. This display is not using the Tobii IS20 but a system developed by Fujitsu themselves which is stated to be low-cost. Question is why they didn't use this for the tablet. From what I can tell it does not provide the same level of accuracy, it appears to be a rough up/down, left/right type of gaze estimation which explains why the demo apps only handles panning of maps and images.