Manu Kumar, a doctoral student from Stanford University, believes the mouse will one day be replaced by our gaze.
The aptly titled project GUIDe, Gaze-enhanced User Interface Design uses eye tracking software called EyePoint with a hi-definition camera to navigate files and surf the web. The approach requires the user to simply focus in on the area they wish to interact with. The area becomes magnified and a hot-key is released to initiate the click. Kumar hopes to eliminate the need for a hot-key altogether and future gazed-based iterations will only require you to blink to initiate a click.
It seems interface design is moving away from tactile responses towards modular digital interfaces. The reasoning being they better imitate the natural gestures people use. Understanding this dichotomy, Kumar originally included a blue dot to follow your gaze so you always knew where you’re looking at but the eye is so much faster optically, the dot slowed a user down considerably. We don’t have natural tactile feedback when we look at something so subsequent tests sans the blue dot revealed people could navigate almost as fast as a mouse if they just trust themselves.
[Via Technology Review]
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3 Responses to “Lovingly gazing at your computer screen replaces the mouse”
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March 4th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Lovingly gazing at your computer screen will someday replace the mouse…
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March 4th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Your editorial comments on the article on the MIT Technology Review website are factually incorrect. First, this research is aimed at augmenting existing devices, not replacing them. Secondly, using blinks is not a very good idea and no where in the article does it say that we expect to replace the hot-key for the blink. In fact to the contrary, Jacob’s comments also refer to the use of multiple modalities for input.
March 4th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
(above comment)
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