dont take my eyeballs
i need them
It's all gestures and eyeball-tracking at CES this year, with Tobii releasing a USB peripheral that adds control-by-sight to any Windows PC and Lenovo upgrading its Yoga to finger-watching. Tobii demonstrated its eyeball-tracking technology at CES last year, but this time it is announcing a 5,000 unit production run of a USB …
WTF was the downvote for? Was it because I mentioned Apple, or because someone disagrees that technology for the sake of technology tends to end up useless? Come on kids, if you're going to downvote on perfectly reasonable posts then at least join the conversation. By all means downvote my unreasonable rants without comment...
"Technology for the sake of technology is why we progress"
No it isn't, throughout history technology has been used to answer problems and dreams. I think you're thinking of science for the sake of science which often leads to advances in technology to answer more dreams and problems, but technology for the sake of technology never succeeds, it just excites some geeks. As I said above, Apple succeed because they start with the problem and bring technology in to solve it. A good example of this is NFC - it's being added to phones but there is no reason to do so and there is no current problem it solves. You could argue (and probably will...) that it will take off when there is sufficient device support, but still nobody has identified a problem that it solves. This eyeball control isn't trying to solve a problem that actually exists and so will be a commercial failure. I agree it's kind of cool for a minute, no disputing that, but it's not a product unless they do something smart like aiming it at disabled people who need eyeball input. Unfortunately, as I said, the addition of the button rules out those people as customers so it would still fail in its current form.
A while back I mused over a simple/cheap way to convert traditional non-touchscreen monitors to something able to control Win 8.
My system involved a series of spring-loaded pulleys (attached on the edge of the screen) and lengths of string looped around your finger. Moving the finger would result in movement in the pulleys which, in turn, transmit the data to the PC.
Obviously, clicking is an issue, so a third string is attached to the thumb to facilitate this. Additional strings can be added for advanced functions (zooming, scrolling etc).
I have RSI and possibly CTS too, so something like this is a positive step forwards as I've been wearing out my wrists for the last 25 years - by using a mouse, which is not a pet name for anything else. There are lots of people like me who are in constant pain when using a mouse.
Once I tried a head tracking device to control the mouse (works a bit like the PS3 Move except you just put a silver sticker on your forehead!) but I developed neck pain as a result from constant, tiny head movements!