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Google buys Eyefluence eye-tracking startup
- Dowwie 10y agoHow many people here cover the front-facing camera on their phone when they're not using it? I haven't, until now.
- arrty88 10y agoThe Samsung phones have a ton of eye and face detection options for brightness and screen wake up based on eye and face detection, which I always turn off to conserve battery. I have never heard of that feature on iPhone though.
- pmyjavec 10y agoThis does sound like a privacy disaster though they don't mention smartphones in the article ? What does sound like a problem is eyes for something they're not intended for, being hands and fingers, I wonder if people will end up with RS'eye' ;)
- wh0rth 10y agoDo you also now cover your computer mic?
- chill1 10y agoNot trolling, serious question: What is the audio/mic equivalent of covering your webcam with a sticker?
- thecatspaw 10y agounplugging it
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI presume GP means the built-in mic that sits next to your built-in webcam.
- icehawk219 10y agoOne that I've seen is plugging something into the audio jack, and then breaking it off and taping over it. That way the computer will detect something is plugged in and turn off the mic. Of course this won't be possible once Apple, and then everyone else, gets rid of the audio jack from computers.
- komali2 10y agoIt would have to be an audio device that has that little "ring" of audio in. Sorry, not knowledgeable in this field, someone smarter will be able to clarify, but I've noticed that my headphones that don't have a mic capability have less little "separator" rings on the 3.5mm jack, whereas the ones that do have mic capability have more. Also your solution seems... excessive...
- piyush_soni 10y agoIsn't that still software controlled? So, let's say a malware is able to gain privileged access to my Windows machine and can install anything, would he be able to override this default behavior of 'turning off the mic when something is plugged in', especially when the external voices are more audible than something coming from the 'plugged in' dummy audio-in cable?
- wickedlogic 10y agohttps://www.obdev.at/products/microsnitch/index.html https://www.obdev.at/products/microsnitch/index.html (best you are going to get at a software level).
- maccard 10y agoUse a machine without an embedded mic (neither of my desktop machines have one)
- JoshTriplett 10y agoIdeally, get a system with a microphone killswitch, such as the Purism devices. Whether you do that or not, use an OS that you trust to mute the microphone, and don't run untrusted applications outside a sandbox.
- smitty1110 10y agoThis is pretty much why I keep the phantom power off when my condenser mic isn't in use. Literally can't work unless I flip a physical switch.
- hairy_man674 10y agoPhysically removed both front and back integrated cameras from my tablet. If the FBI Director is paranoid enough to cover his webcam then that is good enough reason for drastic measures... Privacy aside, I have an ugly face.
- amelius 10y agoHow difficult is it to track eyes using modern deep learning techniques? Isn't this a simple, run of the mill task by now?
- chewxy 10y agoYou don't need deep learning. Seriously. Not everything in the world needs deep learning. I wrote an eyetracking system for tracking my vision while playing mobile games[0], and really, the eye-tracking is quite simple and you can do it with violajones haar cascade and do it with an accuracy high enough that you can press buttons with your vision. The hardest part were ellipse curve-fitting algorithms - I had to go pretty cutting edge for that. [0] http://blog.chewxy.com/2014/04/08/eyetracking-jetpack-joyride-smash-hit-and-dungeon-keeper/ http://blog.chewxy.com/2014/04/08/eyetracking-jetpack-joyrid...
- chriskanan 10y agoI'm a machine learning researcher and I also have a lot of experience analyzing eye movement data. There aren't large labeled datasets that are publicly available in this area. Just to classify eye movements into events, you would need images of the eyes or eye velocity to classify eye events into smooth pursuit, fixation, etc. That means someone needs to label all of those in ground truth. To actually determine what someone is looking at, you have to go beyond this to have information about the scene. When looking at a screen, this is usually done with calibration, but things get more complicated when trying to predict what someone is looking at with a mobile eye tracker and a fixed scene camera. Body and head movements complicate things further (e.g., VOR) and many algorithms ignore them.
- lazyjeff 10y agoMy research group has been trying to address this problem by using user interactions with a website to create this "ground truth". One assumption is that you have to look where you click. But there are more subtle user interactions that could be helpful. Video and demos and source code: http://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/ http://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/
- mrfusion 10y agoCould this be used for vr?
- pmyjavec 10y agoDid you read the article at all ?
- yalogin 10y agoEven though this is for hardware and VR, I have to admit the first thought on seeing the headline was that google doubled down on its advertisement business. More so after the recent news that they changed their policy to track users more.
- _pmf_ 10y agoI can see good eye tracking as getting much, much more traction than VR for regular users. While most applications of VR to everyday tasks seem forced and gimmicky, eye tracking can revolutionize reading, which is arguably the task professional and casual users spend at least 80 percent of their online time on. Much smarter than investing in VR.
- jacquesm 10y agoFor those wondering about the privacy implications of this technology, eyefluence required a VR headset to function and I'm not aware of them demonstrating their tech using the user-facing cameras found in mobile phones and tablets, so I don't think there is any reason for worry on that front (yet). Here is a video of a 2016 demo of eyefluence tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYH8qLvq7rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYH8qLvq7rc
- asafira 10y agoWould this be interesting for Google's Daydream efforts?
- kbenson 10y agoI can't help but feel that most these companies working on these technologies are viewing them in isolation, when none of our peripherals are ever used in isolation. The mouse wasn't developed to replace the keyboard, but to supplement it. You don't generally use a mouse to select characters from a representation of a keyboard on screen (there are reasons when you want this, but it's not the general use case), so why do we always see the equivalent of that in new peripherals? The two main cases I'm thinking of are eye tracking, and brainwave tracking (like EMOTIV). Individually, neither looks like a compelling way to control a computer when you have a mouse and keyboard, but together, I think that might really yield something interesting (and sooner!). Instead of using brain waves to move a cursor around the screen, use eye tracking. Instead of using gaze lingering for click, use brainwave tracking. Individually they seem cumbersome and annoying to use. Together they could be a really compelling interface device, IMO.
- ericjang 10y agoThis operates on the assumption that eye tracking and brain waves signals are positively or negatively correlated (for which the setup you propose can be thought of as an estimator with control variates). Is this indeed the case?
- kbenson 10y agoI'm not sure what information you're working off that makes you think they need to be positively correlated. I'm referring to using two separate systems in conjunction. Eye tracking to cursor placement (and anything else that it can handle well), and brainwave tracking to handle intent. At the simplest level, eye tracking for mouse x/y coordinates, and brainwave tracking for mouse button presses.
- mattkrause 10y agoEye movements and EEG are actually somewhat tricky to record and/or interpret simultaneously. Eye movements cause travelling waves to sweep across visual brain areas (which are actually a huge chunk of the brain), potentially swamping whatever was going on before. Some of this is probably supports visual processing (by, e.g., persisting or resetting neural activity across eye movements), and some of it might be epi-phenomenal. Furthermore, EEG electrodes pick up huge, non-neural signals from the movement of the ocular muscles and the movement of the eyeball itself. This can be reduced with clever pre-processing and more expensive amplifiers (e.g., that don't saturate or recover from saturation more quickly).
- bluedevil2k 10y ago10 years ago while I was IBM, I submitted a proposed patent that was a sort-of-joke by saying Amazon (or other sites) could get rid of 1-click shopping and go to 0-click shopping by following your eyes and automatically making the purchase if you looked at something for a given amount of time. Sounds like this will be a reality in a few years.
- JoshTriplett 10y agoWas it accepted? (Serious version of this: Amazon could feed eye-tracking data into their "stock a product near the user if they're likely to buy it" algorithm.)
- kbenson 10y agoWife: Honey, do you know why Amazon keeps sending us mini-skirts and fishnet stockings? I mean, they're not even in my size! Husband: Nope, sorry, no idea!
- legohead 10y agoHe asks us, "how do you transfer your intent to act without winking and without waiting", but never tells us how its done. Anyone know? This made the video incredibly frustrating for me.
- kajecounterhack 10y agoThey use saccades + some fancy algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade
- rcconf 10y agoThat was super frustrating, I went back a few times to see if he said it and he did not. I was just waiting for him to tell me for the rest of the video and it never happened.
- aresant 10y agoBetter details from a beta tester over on /r/oculus on Eyefluence's tech: " . . . I'm still not allowed to say how exactly it works but in my mind it's the gold standard for eye based user interfaces . . . Their [main focus] is the UI" (1) So sounds like a blend between some good eye tracking tech and some GREAT user experience design and implementation. (1) https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/598clo/google_buys_eyefluence_eyetracking_startup/ https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/598clo/google_buys_...
- misiti3780 10y agoFacebook bought an eye-tracking startup a few years back: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-acquires-gazehawk-for-talent-2012-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-acquires-gazehawk-fo... At the time, i read it was only a acquihire
- microcolonel 10y agoBy the way, Eyefluence's marketing videos are brilliant. I've seen people's arm hairs stand straight watching them. They'd be worth acquiring if only for the marketing department.