Eye tracking is entering the consumer market
For the first time, I read about the system that allows to track a person’s view in the Technique of Youth for either 1989, or 1991. Then this technology was used for research purposes. Since then, 20 years have passed, the application of technology has expanded into medicine, advertising and user interface testing. And finally, this year, this technology is finally entering the consumer market. According to rumors , the Samsung Galaxy S4 will get the function of scrolling text with the help of a glance, as if we’ll find out about it tomorrow, and you can buy a Fujitsu Esprimo FH98 / JD all- in-one PC with a glance tracking system in Japan for about $ 2,850.
The NUIA eyeCharm project from 4tiitoo , which is now raising money for Kickstarter, offers affordable eye tracking technology. For $ 60, the person who supported the company should receive an eyeCharm device in August of this year. The device supports both versions of Kinect - for the Xbox and for Windows. Kinect for the Xbox can be bought for $ 100 . It can be connected to a computer using a USB cable . In total, this device allows you to get a glance tracking system for about $ 165.
The device itself is a hinged addition to Kinect. The Kinect infrared sensor has a resolution of only 640 * 480 at 30 Hz, which is clearly not enough to accurately track such a small object as the eye with a standard Kinect camera field of 57 ° horizontally and 43 ° vertically. Therefore, in NUIA eyeCharm there is an additional optics that focuses the field of view of the Kinect infrared sensor. This makes it possible to increase the amount of data about the user's eyes and makes the whole system possible. The advantage of Kinect is the built-in tilt sensor (27 ° up or down), which allows the system to adjust to the position of the user's head and not to let his eyes out of sight.
Another limitation of Kinect is its hardware latency (latency) of 80ms, which, in combination with the refresh rate of 30Hz, is supposed to give a not very responsive system. The answer to this question is what NUIA really is.
NUIA stands for Natural User InterAction. This is a platform developed by the German company 4tiitoo , as a link between various equipment manufacturers capable of tracking user actions and application developers using this data. At the same time, NUIA is not limited only to eye tracking, but also allows recognition of movements and speech.
4tiitoo plans to release the beta version of the NUIA SDK for developers on July 5 of this year. But it is already clear that 4tiitoo aims to make its SDK universal and claims that they work with many developers of eye tracking, and their SDK supports input from devices created by companies such as tobii and SMI , and also supports motion recognition devices. Kinect, Leap, The Asus® Xtion Pro, Creative® Interactive Gesture.
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And eyeCharm is simply the first device to track the look under the NUIA platform.
Let's go back to Kinect latency. 4tiitoo claims that their NUIA platform has always been developed specifically for consumer-grade hardware, and not for trackers of views used in scientific research, with a high update rate. And the “magic” is in software, not in hardware. Delays, the chaotic movement of the eye and the low accuracy of determining the position of the eye (which in principle can not be more accurate than 0.5 ° due to the characteristics of the human eye) can be compensated in various situations due to smoothing, vector analysis, and predicting the following actions based on previous ones. This goes beyond eye tracking technology and is more related to psychophysiology. For example, in a situation where the user first quickly translates his gaze between several points on the screen, finds the one he needs, focuses his gaze on it and presses a button to perform an action, the user will translate his gaze to the next point before the finger presses the button to end. Thus, the computer will receive a button press event at the moment when the eye is already gone from the point at which the person wanted to perform the action. NUIA compensates for this in accordance with the current situation. And at the same time it does this not only for tracking the glance but for all other supported ways of interaction between the user and the computer.
What is the problem to track the eyes of a person? Tracing the position of the pupil relative to the center of the eye is a trivial task. A device to track the position of the pupil can be made for $ 30 .
Nontrivial task is to determine the position of the head. Devices on the market now solve this problem with the help of additional devices attached to the head.
For example, the Natural Point Trackir 5 head tracking device requires either a baseball cap with reflectors to work:
Or a special clip attached on the headset:
Although for some devices, this problem is not worth it. For Google Glass, for example. And Google is clearly going to use eye tracking in Glass. They have already received a patent for unlocking Glass using eye tracking.
NUIA additional devices are not required, it seems they solved the problem of determining the position of the head without additional markers.
But this task pales in comparison with the task of filtering eye movements. The human eye makes 10-20 movements per second, and most of these movements are unconscious and chaotic. It is exactly how to distinguish the conscious movements of the eyes from the unconscious and is the main problem in tracking the gaze. And this is exactly the main innovation in this project. How good their filtering algorithm is for eye movements will determine the success of the platform.
If 4tiitoo manages to keep these promises, then NUIA will be a real breakthrough and will change how we interact with the computer.
Additional information on the topic.
The NUIA eyeCharm project from 4tiitoo , which is now raising money for Kickstarter, offers affordable eye tracking technology. For $ 60, the person who supported the company should receive an eyeCharm device in August of this year. The device supports both versions of Kinect - for the Xbox and for Windows. Kinect for the Xbox can be bought for $ 100 . It can be connected to a computer using a USB cable . In total, this device allows you to get a glance tracking system for about $ 165.
The device itself is a hinged addition to Kinect. The Kinect infrared sensor has a resolution of only 640 * 480 at 30 Hz, which is clearly not enough to accurately track such a small object as the eye with a standard Kinect camera field of 57 ° horizontally and 43 ° vertically. Therefore, in NUIA eyeCharm there is an additional optics that focuses the field of view of the Kinect infrared sensor. This makes it possible to increase the amount of data about the user's eyes and makes the whole system possible. The advantage of Kinect is the built-in tilt sensor (27 ° up or down), which allows the system to adjust to the position of the user's head and not to let his eyes out of sight.
Another limitation of Kinect is its hardware latency (latency) of 80ms, which, in combination with the refresh rate of 30Hz, is supposed to give a not very responsive system. The answer to this question is what NUIA really is.
NUIA stands for Natural User InterAction. This is a platform developed by the German company 4tiitoo , as a link between various equipment manufacturers capable of tracking user actions and application developers using this data. At the same time, NUIA is not limited only to eye tracking, but also allows recognition of movements and speech.
4tiitoo plans to release the beta version of the NUIA SDK for developers on July 5 of this year. But it is already clear that 4tiitoo aims to make its SDK universal and claims that they work with many developers of eye tracking, and their SDK supports input from devices created by companies such as tobii and SMI , and also supports motion recognition devices. Kinect, Leap, The Asus® Xtion Pro, Creative® Interactive Gesture.
')
And eyeCharm is simply the first device to track the look under the NUIA platform.
Let's go back to Kinect latency. 4tiitoo claims that their NUIA platform has always been developed specifically for consumer-grade hardware, and not for trackers of views used in scientific research, with a high update rate. And the “magic” is in software, not in hardware. Delays, the chaotic movement of the eye and the low accuracy of determining the position of the eye (which in principle can not be more accurate than 0.5 ° due to the characteristics of the human eye) can be compensated in various situations due to smoothing, vector analysis, and predicting the following actions based on previous ones. This goes beyond eye tracking technology and is more related to psychophysiology. For example, in a situation where the user first quickly translates his gaze between several points on the screen, finds the one he needs, focuses his gaze on it and presses a button to perform an action, the user will translate his gaze to the next point before the finger presses the button to end. Thus, the computer will receive a button press event at the moment when the eye is already gone from the point at which the person wanted to perform the action. NUIA compensates for this in accordance with the current situation. And at the same time it does this not only for tracking the glance but for all other supported ways of interaction between the user and the computer.
What is the problem to track the eyes of a person? Tracing the position of the pupil relative to the center of the eye is a trivial task. A device to track the position of the pupil can be made for $ 30 .
Nontrivial task is to determine the position of the head. Devices on the market now solve this problem with the help of additional devices attached to the head.
For example, the Natural Point Trackir 5 head tracking device requires either a baseball cap with reflectors to work:
Or a special clip attached on the headset:
Although for some devices, this problem is not worth it. For Google Glass, for example. And Google is clearly going to use eye tracking in Glass. They have already received a patent for unlocking Glass using eye tracking.
NUIA additional devices are not required, it seems they solved the problem of determining the position of the head without additional markers.
But this task pales in comparison with the task of filtering eye movements. The human eye makes 10-20 movements per second, and most of these movements are unconscious and chaotic. It is exactly how to distinguish the conscious movements of the eyes from the unconscious and is the main problem in tracking the gaze. And this is exactly the main innovation in this project. How good their filtering algorithm is for eye movements will determine the success of the platform.
If 4tiitoo manages to keep these promises, then NUIA will be a real breakthrough and will change how we interact with the computer.
Additional information on the topic.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/172325/
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