back to article Brown boffins brew eye-tracking Javascript

The intentions are good, we suppose: Brown University researchers have published a Javascript library that lets a standard Webcam track eye movements. WebGazer, Githubbed here, is designed to let site designers understand what grabs visitors' attention. The designers explain that they've created a self-calibrating eye- …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Neat

    But I'm not sure I'd ever want to use it.

    Though with a bit of extension, I imagine it might be quite useful to those who have limited manual capabilities.

    1. Tom 7

      Re: Neat

      Probably Very Very useful for people with limited manual capabilities!

      Its under GPL so that makes it even more useful.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Neat

        'Probably Very Very useful for people with limited manual capabilities!'

        Indeed, on the surface this looks like a 'good thing', and there's a couple of internal projects that I might be able to use this on as we have a number of employees with these issues, and as we do have an obligation to make our public website as accessible as possible to everyone, I'll point our web guy in the direction of this.

        '..Its under GPL so that makes it even more useful.'

        And again, good in principle as I'd hate to count the number of times that I've seen similar projects where either the code never gets openly published or just eventually ups and disappears, however it is a bit of a two edged thing. You can see the usual suspects gleefully eyeing up this code with the intention of 'Borging' it into their marketing and surveillance arsenals, user consent would be the first bit hacked out.

        This is why we can't have nice things, as this code and similar/derivative work propagates, I can foresee that even glancing fleetingly at the 'wrong thing' displayed on your browser in the future will be 'dangerous', just think about the number of things you look at on screen on a daily basis, now think about what sort of 'profile' on you they could build up for marketeers or other such lowlifes..

        (oh, wait, but I already have no camera permanently attached to the desktop machine and duct tape over those on the laptops and netbook...ah well)

  2. PassiveSmoking

    I've got nystagmus. Good luck tracking my eye movements, bitches.

  3. Titus Aduxass

    Heat maps

    Will be extremely handy (if it works) for creating heat maps for our intranet.

    I need handy information to try to convince people not to fill their team/project pages with crap and put the useful information in a sensible position on the page.

    If it works...

  4. Chozo
    Devil

    The interactive pron possibilities may be worth ogling

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