You know that you can control your laptop with your mouse, trackpad, and keyboard-and you may even know that you can control your laptop with your voice, and maybe elaborate gestures thanks to motion-tracking devices such as Microsoft's Kinect. But did you know that you can also control your laptop with your eyes?
Sweden-based Tobii Technology has developed eye-tracking technology that allows you to control your laptop and other devices using only your eyes. All you have to do is sit down in front of the computer.
Tobii is built into the laptop, which is made by Lenovo, and is located below the screen. It works by shooting infrared lights into your eyes to cause red-eye which sounds dangerous, but they assure it's perfectly safe. By doing this, Tobii is able to create a 3D model of your eyeball and determine where your eye is relative to space. It then tracks the glint off of your eyeball to determine where your foveal vision, or sharp central vision, is, and, consequently, where you're looking.
Initially there's some calibration, but it's pretty quick and easy. All you have to do is sit down in front of the computer and follow the flashing dots on the screen with your eyes-there are about five in total. This is a one time calibration, as once you've calibrated it the computer knows where your eyes are. Once the calibration is finished which takes about thirty seconds, you can start eye-controlling your device right away.
There are a couple of other uses for Tobii technology. For example, the technology can track your eye movement when you're reading a document and automatically scroll down when you reach the end of the page. Also, the technology allows you to zoom into a particular area of the screen just by looking at that part of the screen and using your mouse's scroll wheel.
However, Tobii technology is not a replacement for your mouse or your keyboard, since you can't blink to click or anything cool like that, it's just an additional way to interact with your device.
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