Gaze Control

Imagine investing tens of billions in head-mounted computing like Oculus and seeing no better use case than social networking. Enter Facebook+RayBans:

“We’re passionate about exploring devices that can give people better ways to connect with those closest to them. Wearables have the potential to do that. With EssilorLuxottica we have an equally ambitious partner who’ll lend their expertise and world-class brand catalogue to the first truly fashionable smart glasses,” Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of the Reality Labs division, said in a statement.

Controlling your mouse by looking at your screen is more far-reaching and orders of magnitude cheaper. precisiongazemouse.org is all that.

Using your gaze as an input device enables all applications where the user’s hands and voice are unavailable.

I’m particularly inspired by musical performance, where the hands and even feet are committed to controlling an instrument and the voice is singing. Guitar pedal boards are a huge distraction.

Public speaking has similar constraints, but probably better budgets. Removing hand controllers from teleprompters would make the speaker more natural and authentic, less like an infomercial.

Not that eyeballs are the only viable approach. There’s more than one way to do it, and brain-computer interfaces are just around the bend. “This mind-controlled concept car lets you switch radio stations just by thinking about it“.

…but gaze detection is both massively simpler and cheaper. It is the simplest thing that could possibly work.