eyesmart.com.au

You thought Siri’s voice interface for the iPhone 4S was pretty slick? Wait until you see what the people behind Copenhagen-based project Senseye have planned – controlling your phone with your eyes. The team has developed technology that tracks the movement of your eyes using the front-facing camera on mobile phones. This then allows you to control all sorts of aspects of the phone. You will be able to send messages, play games and more without having to touch the handset at all. A developer interface will allow third-party apps to work with Senseye, and the plan is to earn revenue through licensing the technology to manufacturers so that it can be baked into the operating systems on handsets straight out of the box.

The technology is based on earlier work by the team, which resulted in an open source eye-tracking product called ITU Gaze Tracker, aimed at disabled people who may not be able to use conventional interfaces. Since that work at the IT University of Copenhagen, Senseye has taken part in Startup Bootcamp, where it worked on EyeProof, an eye tracking product for market research.

The mobile phone control product started as a prototype at Mobile Startup Weekend Copenhagen in June this year. Since then the project has won the ABB Award for Global Innovation and was first runner-up in the ICT championship at the Global Idea2Product competition in Sweden. The video below shows the technology running on an Android handset, being used to control a game.