While natural user interfaces have yet to offer anything leaning ever so slightly towards mind control, we’ll take eye control as our favorite concept for the present. Tobii and Lenovo are showing off a fresh batch of notebooks which can be controlled by the eyes at the CeBIT 2011.
Eye control is expected to make the human and PC interaction more natural and effective. It’s like having a machine understand users’ minds by simply reading their eyes. With the Tobii-Lenovo PC, people may zoom into photos or maps and even center on the location being studied by merely employing the eyes. The device can also auto-dim or brighten the display depending on whether it’s being used or not.
“More than anything else, the Tobii laptop prototype is proof that our eye tracking technology is mature enough to be used in standard computer interfaces. To reach a state where the technology is part of the average computer, we need to make it smaller and cheaper. We believe that this can be realized in a couple of years by partnering with the right manufacturer,†cited Henrik Eskilsson, CEO, Tobii Technology.
“On the one hand, we have Lenovo, a great partner, representing industry-leading expertise in computer manufacturing and hardware development. Tobii, on the other hand, has the world’s leading eye tracking technology and unique expertise in eye tracking and eye control interfaces. We are very happy with the outcome of this collaboration,†continued Eskilsson.
Eye control can save on time by enabling intuitive ways to move between windows or browse through e-mails, documents and so on. A lot of technology companies have been working hard at natural human interfaces of late. And considering Microsoft’s Kinect and the WAVI Xtion UI device, we certainly like what we’re seeing.
Sadly, we don’t have the foggiest idea on when these Tobii-Lenovo notebooks will be commercially viable as yet. The 20 units hitting the CeBIT 2011 are intended for development and demo purposes only.
