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.
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- …
'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)