Can a Look in Our Eyes Prompt Computers?
June 13 -- — Wouldn't it be great if your TV set knew when you looked away and automatically paused so that you didn't miss a beat in your favorite show? Such technology may not be far away.
Ted Selker, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's context-aware computing lab, is a pioneer in technology that eases communication between computers and people.
Selker and his colleague, Roel Vertegaal of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, say the ultimate goal of the technology is to have computers do things for people simply because the person wants them to.
"We want jukeboxes that know your song, car radios that switch to another station without you having to reach for a knob," Selker told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "Too often, the people who make computers limit their thinking to the desk top. We want to think beyond that, think about how computers could be everywhere in the home, the car, to make a person's life a great deal easier."
All in the Eyes
Much of the technology — which is some five to 15 years away from being on the market — is driven by eye-recognition technology, by which a simple sensor can pick up information about human eye behavior and use that information to send everyday gadgets into action.
It would be able to check, for instance, if the person wants the TV playing, the lights on or off, and if another person is paying attention to a person who is speaking. The system gauges human "implicit communication," such as eye movement, finger movement or head movement.
To demonstrate how it works, Selker and Vertegaal used an eye-recognition barking dog toy and a pair of sunglasses. The two items — sunglasses and dog — can interact through basic infrared technology that involves a send-and-receive signal device.
Light sensors in the glasses measure how interested the wearer is in something by the way the person looks at it. If the person wearing the glasses blinks a lot, or is looking away, the barking dog will pick that up and turn itself off. If two people wear the glasses, the lights on the glasses blink if the two are making eye contact, but not if they aren't.
