Can a Look in Our Eyes Prompt Computers?

June 13, 2003 -- — 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.

TV That Watches You

Another gadget they are experimenting with is called Attentive TV. While you are sitting in a chair watching a movie on your computer, a camera watches your eyes.

"When I am focused on the screen, these lights are green; it is reading the glint," Vertegaal said. "It's kind of like red-eye technology. By looking at the TV or glancing away, the movie will turn either on or off."

"Eyepliances" allow users to turn appliances, like a lava light, on or off just by looking at them and giving a voice command.

"While you're at you computer, if you don't want to get up you can just tell that light to go on," Vertegaal said. "The catch is it will only go on if you look at it. Say 'turn off' and it turns off. But if I am not looking at it, all the words I say do not do a thing."

The eyepliances look at your eye, not head movement.

Eye Contact With Phone

Finally there is the Eyeproxy, a Felix the Cat-looking device with shaking eyeballs, designed to deal with the annoyance of getting a phone call while you are in the middle of something. If you look at the shaking eyeballs on the device, they'll suddenly stop, stare back at you and patch the call through. If you don't make eye contact, the answering machine kicks in.

Selker also had some other gadgets that don't rely on the eye movement technology.

His talking cooking spoon can tell what temperature, how salty and how sour something he is mixing is. It can also gauge the thickness of a mixture. Each recipe is fed into the spoon via computer. If a recipe needs a pinch more salt, the spoon's "voice" lets him know.

Another invention is the talking trivet. A thermo-resistor can note the temperature of foods and containers that are placed on it.

It also sets an automatic timer for cooking, which is based on the temperature of oven. A 275-degree oven exclaims that the food should be checked in 40 minutes, while a 500-degree one says it should be tested in 10 minutes.