Low Cost Eye Tracking for Commercial Gaming: eyeAsteroids and eyeShoot in the Dark!

Latest update from Stephen Vickers and Howell Istance at the Centre for Computational Intelligence, De Montfort University who have been doing research and development of gaze-based gaming for several years now. Their latest project has been shortlisted in the consumer category of The Enginner Awards 2011. Congratulations on an awesome job!

"Using your eyes and where you are looking to interact with computer games represents an exciting new direction that game play can take, following the success of whole body interaction enabled by the Kinect and the Wii. The Innovation Fellowship has supported the development and demonstration of a low-cost eye tracker by De Montfort University, in collaboration with Sleepy Dog, the East Midlands games company that produced the Buzz-it controller and games. The low-cost eye tracker utilised the ITU Gazetracking library and was produced as a fully working pre-production prototype. In the project, three different games were produced to demonstrate different ways in which eye gaze can be used to make game play more immersive and exciting.

This video demostrates two of them.

• eyeAsteroids The ship flies towards where you are looking and the space bar is used to fire.
• eyeShoot in the Dark! The torch shines at where you are looking and the mouse is used to move the cross-hair and fire. 

SMI Glasses now available

The SMI Glasses, which we got a sneak-peak at before last Christmas and specs in April are now available for sale. SMI engineers have managed to squeeze two 30Hz eye tracking cameras and a high definition scene camera into the frame weighting only 75 grams. The advantage of tracking both eyes is that it enables parallax compensation where the accuracy is maintained regardless if you look close or far in the scene. In addition, binocular tracking most often yields better accuracy as it provides the opportunity to average both samples or to discard one with low validity. The HD scene camera captures 24 frames per second at 1280x960 pixels, a clear advantage. All in all, better late than never, SMI is back with a highly competitive product in the market. 

ETRA 2012 - Call for papers

"The Seventh ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2012) will be held in Santa Barbara, California on March 28th-30th, 2012. The ETRA conference series focuses on all aspects of eye movement research and applications across a wide range of disciplines.  The symposium presents research that advances the state-of-the-art in these areas, leading to new capabilities in gaze tracking systems, gaze aware applications, gaze based interaction, eye movement data analysis, etc. For ETRA 2012, we invite papers in all areas of eye tracking research and applications."

ETRA 2012 THEME: MOBILE EYE TRACKING

     Mobile devices are becoming more powerful every day. Embedding eye tracking and gaze-based applications in mobile devices raises new challenges and opportunities to many aspects of eye tracking research. ETRA 2012 invites papers tackling the challenges, or exploring new research opportunities of mobile eye tracking.

GENERAL AREAS OF INTEREST

Eye Tracking Technology

    Advances in eye tracking hardware, software and algorithms such as: 2D and 3D eye tracking systems, calibration, low cost eye tracking, natural light eye tracking, predictive models, etc.

Eye Tracking Data Analysis

    Methods, procedures and analysis tools for processing raw gaze data as well as fixations and gaze patterns. Example topics are: scan path analysis, fixation detection algorithms, and visualization techniques of gaze data.

Visual Attention and Eye Movement Control

       Applied and experimental studies investigating visual attention and eye movements to gain insight in eye movement control, cognition and attention, or for design evaluation of visual stimuli. Examples are: usability and web studies using eye tracking, and eye movement behavior in everyday activities such as driving and reading.

Eye Tracking Applications

    Eye tracking as a human-computer input method, either as a replacement to traditional input methods or as a complement. Examples are: assistive technologies, gaze enhanced interaction and interfaces, multimodal interaction, gaze in augmented and mixed reality systems, and gaze-contingent displays.

SUBMISSIONS

Authors are invited to submit original work in the formats of Full paper (8 pages) and Short paper (4 pages). The papers will undergo a rigorous review process assessing the originality and quality of the work as well as the relevance for eye tracking research and applications.  Papers presented at ETRA 2012 will be available in the ACM digital library.  Submission formats and instructions are available at the conference web site.

IMPORTANT DATES

  Oct. 07th, 2011 Full Paper abstracts submission due

  Oct. 14th, 2011 Full Papers submission due 

  Nov. 21st, 2011  Full Papers acceptance notification 

  Dec. 07th, 2011 Short Papers submission due

  Jan. 16th, 2012 Short Papers acceptance notification

  Jan. 23rd, 2012 Camera ready papers due

 

CONFERENCE VENUE

ETRA 2012 will be held at the gorgeous Doubletree Resort in Santa Barbara, California, a 24-acre, mission-style resort hotel facing the Pacific Ocean, located on one of Southern California’s most beautiful coastlines.

SPONSORSHIP

ETRA 2012 is co-sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group in Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), and the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH). 

CONFERENCE CHAIRS

 Carlos Hitoshi Morimoto - University of São Paulo, Brazil

 Howell Istance - De Montfort University, UK

PROGRAM CHAIRS

Jeffrey B. Mulligan - NASA, USA

Pernilla Qvarfordt - FX Palo Alto, USA

PROGRAM AREA CHAIRS

       Andrew Duchowski, Clemson University, USA
       Päivi Majaranta, University of Tampere, Finland
       Joe Goldberg, Oracle, USA
       Shu-Chieh Wu, NASA Ames Research Center, USA
       Qiang Ji, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
       Jeff Pelz, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
       Moshe Eizenman, University of Toronto, USA

Job opening at Duke University: Software developer with research focus

Under the direction of the Chair of the Department of Radiology at Duke University and an international research group, the Software Engineer is responsible for developing and maintaining a research platform used to study visual perception. This research project utilizes eye trackers to capture gaze paths as the Radiologists search through medical image data sets. Your role involves rapid software development; as such you should be comfortable with swiftly assembling software on short iterations without formal requirements. Tasks and Activities: Rapid software development to support research activities without formal requirements. Analyze design and architectural issues, and adjust existing system design and procedures to solve problems in a dynamic environment. Solving a wide range of problems ranging from user interface design to more complex architectural design without supervision. Readily accept responsibility and demonstrate ability to work independently. Responsible for designing, developing, implementing, testing and maintaining software. Regularly communicate project progress, issues, and risks to project manager. Organizing datacollection with human subjects using eye tracking devices and the developed software platform. Qualifications: Required: Strong technical knowledge and experience in the development, implementation and maintenance of an information system. Aptitude to learn and understand change in software development process, procedures and methodologies. Demonstrated experience with scientific methodology, academic writing and basic statistical analysis. 5+ years of software development experience in object-orient programming technologies. 2+ years of experience with Microsoft .Net C# and Windows Presentation Foundation. Detailed technical knowledge and experience in use of data structures and network programming using TCP/IP and UDP. Desired: Experience with eye track systems or other forms of video-based tracking systems. Experience from software engineering in a research setting. Experience with the DICOM Medical Image format and visualization. Experience designing or implementing algorithms for data analysis and image processing. Education MS+ in Computer Science or equivalent Please visit this page to apply for the opening.

LG introduces the world first Glasses-Free 3D monitor with eye-tracking technology

Today LG announced a 20" LCD display with built-in "eye tracking" technology that enables glasses-free 3D imaging which moves this technology closer to the consumer market. The image below does, as far as I can tell, not reveal any infrared illuminators, a requirement for all known systems with high accuracy so it's probably more of a rough estimation system than a full-blown remote system. Best known accuracy (published research) under natural light is about 3-4 degrees of angle, with their financial resources they could potentially achieve better results. 

Left. The "special" eye tracking camera sensor. Looks like a rather typical webcam CMOS sensor to me. Unless they are doing some magic it will not allow accurate gaze estimation. Regardless, makes me wonder if 3D displays is the path by which eye tracking goes mainstream? Is this related to the collaboration between Seeing Machines and SuperD announced earlier this year or just a competing solution? Details are sparse, I'll keep you posted as it becomes available. 

Official press release:


SEOUL, July, 13, 2011 – LG Electronics (LG) today unveiled the world’s first glasses-free monitor utilizing eye-tracking technology to maintain an optimal 3D image from a range of viewing angles. The 20-inch D2000 (Korean model: DX2000) monitor was developed as a fully functional entertainment display capable of reproducing games, movies and images in all their realistic glory.

“With a full line-up of 3D TVs, laptops, projectors and smartphones, LG Electronics is by far and away the industry leader in all things 3D.” said Si-hwan Park, Vice President of the Monitor Division at LG’s Home Entertainment Company. “LG’s position has always been that 3D will and must eventually function without glasses. The D2000 is a look at what the future has in store.”

The D2000’s 3D effect comes courtesy of glasses-free parallax barrier 3D technology, and the application of the world’s first eye-tracking feature to the monitor. The combination of parallax barrier and eye-tracking in a single unit promises to open up new horizons for glasses-free 3D products.

Existing glasses-free 3D technologies generally require viewers to stay within a tightly restricted angle and distance to perceive the 3D images. However, the D2000 has done much to resolve this issue, allowing viewer much freer movement and more comfortable viewing. Eye tracking in the D2000 works via a special camera sensor attached to the monitor which detects changes in the user’s eye position in real-time. With this information, the monitor calculates the angle and position of the viewer and adjusts the displayed image for the optimal 3D effect.

In addition to playing back existing 3D content, the D2000 has a highly refined 2D to 3D conversion feature which adds a new dimension to existing movies and game playing.

The D2000, available in Korea this month, will be introduced in other markets around the world in the latter part of 2011.

This video demonstrates the use of Ergoneers Dikablis Eye-Control Module used to interact with a standard LCD TV. The project was carried out in collaboration with Technical University of Munich and reminds me much of an ongoing research project at ITU Copenhagen.

Gliding and Saccadic Gaze Gesture Recognition in Real Time (Rozado, 2011)

David Rozado with the Department of Neural Computation at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid have developed a neural network approach for detecting gaze gestures in real time. I met David at ITU Copenhagen last summer when he was visiting and discussed this research, I'm happy to see that it came out with such great results. This research was part of Davids Ph.D thesis which focused on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) neural network which is a bioinspired pattern recognition algorithm. Using a low cost webcam and the ITU Gaze Tracker he is able to recognize ten different gestures with 90% accuracy using raw data. When a fixation detection algorithm and dwell time triggers are employed it is possible to achieve 100% detection rates (at the expense of longer activation times). 

Eyetrax webcam eye tracker from Carnegie Mellon

"Eyetrax is dynamic eye tracking software that uses a simple stationary web camera to detect eye movement. It can be used as a motionless computer interface and is especially useful when working with ALS patients. Additionally, the non-obtrusive nature of the program allows it to work perfectly to discretely generate hotspot maps for marketing purposes". The system is developed by Joseph Fernandez, Skylar Roebuck and Jonathon Smereka and was demonstrated at the Multimedia Computing Demos on May 3rd at Carnegie Mellon.

Utechzone demos

Recently Taiwanese Utechzone demonstrated a little game at Taipei Computex 2011.



Utechzone also demonstrated a driver fatigue detection system which is housed in a smaller formfactor. This system tracks the eye (open/closed) but doesn't perform gaze estimation. The video also shows the underlying gaze tracking system used in their Spring system which appears to have some issues with glasses.


Fast forward to 1 minute in

Mobile gaze-based screen interaction in 3D environments (D. Mardanbeigi, 2011)

Diako Mardanbeigi presents a method that enables the user to interact with any planar digital display in a 3D environment using a head-mounted eye tracker. An effective method for identifying the screens in the field of view of the user is also presented which can be applied in a general scenario in which multiple users can interact with multiple screens. Diakos PhD project at ITU Copenhagen concerns mobile gaze-based interaction. 





Related publication: 

• Diako Mardanbegi and Dan Witzner Hansen. 2011. Mobile gaze-based screen interaction in 3D environments. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Novel Gaze-Controlled Applications(NGCA '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 2 , 4 pages. PDF/Online