Controlling Your Mouse... With Your Eyeballs

Eye tracking technology (which uses a camera to track your pupil and figure out exactly what you're looking at) has been around for a long time, but only now has someone finally wised up and figured out how to adapt this technology to control the cursor you'd otherwise be handling with your mouse.

According to an article in Technology Review, the system (a research project from a Stanford researcher) lets you point, highlight text, and scroll around pages using nothing but your eyes. Nifty.

One of the challenges with eye tracking is that your eyes tend to dart about as you scan a page, voluntarily or not. If you've ever seen an eye-tracking map of a user reading a web page, you know how erratic it tends to be. (Here's a good example.) 

The Stanford project addresses many of these issues by having the user hold down a key on the keyboard, when causes the screen to zoom in where the eye is currently focused. As the zoom magnifies, the user fine-tunes his gaze on exactly the point he wants to click, then releases the key. This is considered an improvement over the typical method of eye tracking, which is usually to look at what you want to click on, then blink, though obviously it is appropriate only for users with at least some use of their hands.

With more and more PCs featuring built-in webcams, the era of ubiquitous eye-tracking technology may be upon us sooner than you think. Keep your eyes out for it. (No pun intended.)