Another revolutionary new concept for the eye tracking world has hit the news in recent weeks. We’ve seen everything from eye tracking feeding devices to video games to driver safety. Today, we look at a completely different arena. Photography.
When you think about “eye tracking” and “camera” in the same sentence, the camera is often the element implementing the actual eye tracking. Infrared cameras are popularly used to actually capture images of the eyes in order to enable eye tracking to actually take place. Today, however, the eyes are implementing the camera.
Mimi Zou is an innovation design engineer from the Royal College of Art in London. She is working on a prototype camera controlled by eye tracking. The project, called Iris, is an attempt to make a camera that adapts to you just as much as you adapt to it.
Eye tracking controls all the major mechanics of the prototype camera. Squinting makes it zoom in, opening your eyes makes it zoom out, and blinking twice makes activates the shutter. Additionally, one proposed feature to the Iris system is biometric recognition. Basically, the camera can recognize you by your eyes and set your preferred defaults automatically.
Talk about intuitive!
It may be a while yet until we can see the Iris system on the market. There are still major hurdles to overcome to bringing this prototype to a real product. However, Zou is optimistic, and so are we.
