Hasta La Gadget!

Remember SMI’s Eye Tracking Glasses? They use a pair of small cameras on the rim to follow your gaze, allowing corporate and academic types to to see exactly what consumers and other subjects are focused on. Now the German company has launched Eye Tracking Glasses 2.0, an update that brings a slimmer design, instant setup, 60Hz eye-tracking performance and a smartphone-based recorder — currently a customized Samsung Galaxy S4. Along with a bit less dorky look, the new electronics allow for much smoother tracking and shorter gaze time perception, according to SMI. There’s no word on pricing or availability for businesses, but there is a rather dry video after the break.

Filed under: Displays, Wearables

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The latest wave of Windows 8 ultrabooks blend keyboards, mice, and touchscreen gestures into a (theoretically) seamless experience. But even with touch as an input option, accessibility remains an issue for people with limited mobility, or those who suffer from …

Valve has a surprisingly varied staff roster. Mike Ambinder is the company’s very own experimental psychologist and he’s been outlining some of Valve’s work with biofeedback technology, including eye-motion controls for Portal 2 and perspiration-based gaming adjustments on Left 4 Dead. Mentioning these developments at the NeuroGaming Conference last week, Ambinder notes that both are still at an experimental stage, but that “there is potential on both sides of the equation, both for using physiological signals to quantify an emotion [and] what you can do when you incorporate physiological signals into the gameplay itself.”

In Left 4 Dead, test subjects had their sweat monitored, with values assigned to how much they were responding to the action. This data was fed back into the game, where designers attempted to modify (and improve) the experience. In a test where players had four minutes to shoot 100 enemies, calmer participants would progress normally, but if they got nervous, the game would speed up and they would have less time to shoot. When it came to the eye-tracking iteration of Portal 2, the new controls apparently worked well, but also necessitated separating aiming and viewpoint to ensure it worked. With Valve already involving itself in wearable computing, it should make both notions easier to accomplish if it decides to bring either experiment to fans. Venture Beat managed to record Ambinder’s opening address at the conference — we’ve added it after the break.

Filed under: Gaming

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Source: Venture Beat

Sure, there’s been a lot of buzz about possible eye-based scrolling in Samsung’s Galaxy S IV, but LG’s in the eye-recognition spotlight — for today, at least. The electronics giant has revealed that a “Value Pack” update for the Optimus G Pro will be served up in Korea next month, and will pack a feature called Smart Video that responds to a user’s peepers. With its front-facing camera, the handset will pause a video if the user looks away, and start playing it when their gaze falls back on the display. In addition, the upgrade will pack what’s said to be a world’s first Dual Camera feature (taking a page from the phone’s Dual Recording feature, of course), which creates picture-in-picture shots by using the hardware’s two cameras.

Devices will also receive the ability to change the home button’s LED to correlate with contacts, pause and resume video recording, color emoticons and refreshed QRemote functionality. According to LG, the update’s features will find their way to their other premium smartphones in the future, but there’s no word on when the revamped software will arrive on phones in other territories. Hit the break for more details in the press release.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, LG

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Can 3D glasses get any less fashionable? Of course they can! And here’s some proof. Today, SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) teased its new Eye-Tracking 3D Glasses, which use a pair of small cameras mounted to the eyeglass rim to keep tabs on your gaze, adjusting perspective as you look about a scene. The rig uses ActiveEye technology from Volfoni, and can detect eye distance as well in order to provide a 3D-viewing experience that’s optimized for each user. Adding some optional hardware, including optical targets (as seen in the video after the break), can enable 6D head tacking support, for an even more immersive experience. Naturally, the solution is a bit cumbersome, and while pricing hasn’t been announced, we don’t expect it to come cheap — it’s definitely something you’d be more likely to see implemented as part of a virtual reality system, rather than a device you’d use at home. So, while you may never see such a product in the flesh, you can still get an idea of how it’ll work in the video after the break.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Wearables

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Source: SMI (PR Newswire)