The Vangelis NewsRoom » Fun

Eye tracking technology: The future of maximum accuracy input?

Bretos Margetis — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:02:45 +0000

Fruit Ninja, a popular mobile game, requires split-second discrimination to obliterate fruit while avoiding the occasional bomb. It’s designed to be played on a touchscreen device or with Kinect hand movements, but playing it with your eyes alone is as exhilarating as it is revealing. If the hand is like an engine that idles at 600 RPM and can reach redline at 6000 RPM, one might liken the eye to a turbine idling at 20,000 RPM that can spool to 100,000 RPM and back in milliseconds. The godlike control of Fruit Ninja’s sword has been bestowed by eye tracking hardware known as Senseye, made by the Danish company Utechzone. It comprises a power strip-sized assemblage of infrared LEDs and cameras that is tucked beneath the monitor. This device is bulky and hardware developers are now wrestling with the Promethean task of doing the same with the existing flesh of smartphones or tablets. The i Beam tablet, from NTT DoCoMo, is one of the front runners that promises full eye control using dual integrated front-facing cameras. Other developers claim to need only the single, native camera of a more phone-sized device. They are all hoping to avoid the premature release missteps that have dogged technologies like Smart Stay for the Samsung Galaxy S III. Smart Stay was designed to allow the device screen to remain active while the user was looking at it, but in practice operating conditions were limited by variations in ambient light, relative position and angle of the device to the head, and the stability therein. The transition of eye tracking from merely being an assistive technology to potentially becoming a mandatory one is in part being aided by seemingly unrelated advances in 3D viewing. Developers are becoming more familiar with advanced signal processing techniques like sensor fusion, Kalman filters, and wavelet transforms among others, and we are seeing the mind-jarring results with visual apps that leap out of the screen as the device is tilted or manipulated. 3D mapping, orientation, and the ability to flit effortlessly through media galleries are among the benefactors of these new techniques. While these apps garner considerable positioning information about the device on which they run, they have none about the person they are presenting information to. Apple filed patents as early as 2010, when Nintendo was gearing up to release the 3DS, for integrating sensor data to establish a precisely defined point in space for a device. Presumably, at the time, knowledge of the location and orientation of the user’s head and eyes could be combined to create a convincing presentation of 3D content. Eye tracking on Android was meanwhile given a boost when the OpenCV API port was announced giving developers a choice to use either a C++ wrapper or the JavaCV API. The image processing libraries in OpenCV have traditionally been straightforward to use, easily compiled with existed programs, and had the ability to reliably produce the coordinates of features on the human face, even as the face moved. Successful eye tracking depends on accurate separation of movements of the head from movements of the eye within the head to ascertain gaze direction. Nathan Myhrvold showcased OpenCV’s power when he successfully tracked and zapped mosquitoes with a laser using his “backyard Star Wars” device. Hands-free scrolling through a web page, or turning pages of an e-book, is certainly a convenience, but the real advantage to using the eyes for control is speed. To draw a comparison we can take a look at one of the intrinsic muscles of the hand, like the adductor pollicus (the little bump that swells up when you draw the thumb inwards). The brain drives muscles like this one with relatively slow pulse trains, or “spikes”, from its motor neurons. These pulse trains max out perhaps at a frequency of a few tens of hertz when a command to move is initiated from the brain. At baseline, when there is no movement or requirement for force, these muscle drivers idle against the onset of rigor mortis with just a few spontaneous spikes occurring on second timescales. But the motor neurons that control the six eye muscles fire away in constant readiness at a very high spontaneous rate, with peak rates ramping up to several hundred hertz at the onset of a saccade, the technical term for a stereotypical eye movement. What this all translates into, in terms of control, is extremely low latency both to first initiate movement, and also to effect subsequent multistep eye movements. These rapid compound eye movements are essentially pre-programmed ballistic endeavours. In games like Fruit Ninja, this equates to a lot more sliced fruit then would be possible with ordinary mouse control. The drawback is that in order to discriminate between the good fruit and the bad bombs one has to look at them, which in the absence of further control is equivalent to selecting them. The user thus quickly develops an innate emotional fear of the bombs and adapts by relying more on peripheral vision. The longer term physiologic effects of this remain to be seen. One way to approach the observation versus selection problem in eye control would be to incorporate features similar to those used in products like the Ion Wireless Air Mouse Glove, available in the US from Bellco as a replacement for an ordinary mouse. It can be quite difficult to use the glove for tasks like grabbing the corner of a window for resizing, but for relaxed armchair scrolling, or effecting a mouse click by a near effortless twitch of the thumb, it is second to none. The key feature of interest here is a little pause button which takes the position tracking function of the glove offline when the user wants to make a non-purposeful gesture like scratching the chin. Methods to toggle out the eye control function with a blink or quick glance to a “home” position on the screen are being actively explored, but a clear and practical mechanism has yet to emerge. An obvious problem is that with the absence of blinks, dry eyes and discomfort would soon result. One remedy might be a program running in the background that signals when the eye tracking software is offline with a comforting blue dot in a corner of the screen. The regularity of the dot’s appearance could be set according to a predefined delay, or possibly a detected change in the reflective or refractive property of the eye due to dryness. Compulsory blinks might then be trained in a Pavlovian fashion, such that neither the dot nor incidentals of the blink attain disruptive consciousness perception. There is still much to be done to bring eye tracking into a peaceable coexistence with the normal functioning of the eye. The full resolution and speed theoretically achievable for selection or gesture with the eye is unlikely to be fully tapped with present-day hardware and will require additional breakthroughs. Peripherals like contact lenses impregnated with fluorescent microbeads or magnetic agents have been investigated and could eventually find application. Current software can already ascertain physiologic variables like rate of droop for the eyelid and constriction of the pupil to estimate arousal. These parameters, delivered for little additional cost once the pupil or other source of contrast has been tracked, await future application. Eye tracking, once the province of £20,000 specialised instruments, now has the attention of all the major smart device players. The question facing us is – are the demonstrations now circulating among trade shows and conventions niche gimmicks, high-wire circus acts, representing the limits of current hardware tweaked to the extreme after much practice and patience, or do they flow surely and easily from our current technologies, achieved inevitably like a child beginning to walk? If the latter, many of us will soon be all too eager to surrender our blinks to our machines. by John Hewitt

Spotify app Soundrop relaunches as social music player

Bretos Margetis — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 14:51:32 +0000

Spotify’s turntable Soundrop app, which creates listening rooms on the music steaming service has launched a revamped version that makes it more like a social network.

Spotify launched the app a year ago and it has racked up 340 million plays since then, proving to be one of the most popular apps on the music streaming service. Its core idea is users can enter listening rooms based on genres, record labels or even artists, and then influence the music programming of a room by voting for tracks, making it a sort of cross between Turntable.fm and Reddit.

According to Gigaom, Soundrop’s CEO Inge Andre Sandvik has confirmed that the app has been rebuilt to allow users to interact more easily by listing which rooms their friends are in at any given time, and introducing a slide-out sidebar that offers quick access to room-specific chats and activity feeds.

Additionally, upcoming songs can now be previewed, giving users an option to more carefully select the songs they’re voting on.

Although Oslo-based Soundrop enjoys most of its success on its mobile apps, Sandvik said that he wants to launch a web-based platform as well as focusing on group music listening through video.

“It’s a conceptual change of what Soundrop is. Suddenly, we are a music player,” he said.

by Monira Matin, 25 October, 2012

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange to star on The Simpsons

Bretos Margetis — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:46:57 +0000

The episode will see The Simpsons move next door to Julian Assange

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is to guest star on animated comedy The Simpsons, it has been confirmed.

The 500th episode will see the family moving to an isolated house and finding themselves living next to Assange.

Fox said Assange, currently under house arrest while he appeals his extradition to Sweden over alleged sex offences – which he denies, recorded his lines from the UK.

The new episode will be broadcast in the US on 19 February.

The Simpsons’ executive producer Al Jean told Entertainment Weeklythat series creator Matt Groening heard a rumour that Assange was interested in guest-starring on the series.

“We asked our casting director Bonnie Pietila – who had been able to unearth Thomas Pynchon and got Tony Blair to do the show – to find Mr Assange. And she did,” Jean said.

Jean added the show’s creative team realised Assange was “controversial” but they avoided delving into “the legal situation that he’s in”.

“We wanted to make sure it was satirical, and he was willing to do that,” he said.

Last year’s guests included 24 star Kiefer Sutherland, chef Gordon Ramsey and Glee’s Jane Lynch.

Monday Blues? 10 Ways To Motivate Your Mind

Bretos Margetis — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:37:11 +0000

It is Monday morning and for whatever reason you can not seem to get going. Here are 10 techniques to spark your mind at work and get your day off to a positive start.

1. Commit to a quick win. Think of a task you know you can get done quickly and do it. You will jump start your brain and get satisfaction from getting a task out of the way.

2. Take a break. You’ve been at work for less than an hour and you are already stressed out. Take a walk to a quiet place and gather your thoughts for 15 minutes. You will relieve some of your stress and removed from the stress environment you can gather your thoughts on how to deal with the issues in a productive manner.

3. Take a Gemba walk. Walk around the Gemba (the place the work is done) to see and hear what is going on. Take time to talk to your employees and help with any issues they are having. This will give you a good feel for how the day is going and make you aware of issues that need to be dealt with. You should do this everyday even if you are not having a mind meltdown.

4. Brainstorm. Grab a piece of paper and pick a topic you need to deal with. Just start writing and do not let your pen stop. Write down everything you can think of about this topic including issues, possible solutions, and any related pieces of information that pop in your brain. After 10-15 minutes organize your words in a logical format and pick out the ideas that have potential. You can act on them now or wait.

5. Plan for your Monday on Friday. Before you leave on Friday take 15 minutes to jot down ideas or tasks you need to do on Monday. Usually on Friday afternoon your mind is more at ease and you are able to think clearly. This will give you a good place to start your day on Monday.

6. Plan for your week ahead. Your week may be full of meetings and deadlines already. Plan for your week by creating a rough roadmap on what you need to get done. Write down the important things you must get done and prioritize them. Keep it visible during the week to be sure that you get them done.

7. Do not grab extra caffeine or an energy drink. While you may gain temporary benefits from chemical stimulation, later in the day you will crash both physically and mentally. If you feel the need for energy take quick walk outside if possible.

8. Laugh and smile. Recall happy memories or some jokes that make you laugh. Go to your happy place for a few minutes. Research has shown that laughter causes your body to release endorphins which naturally make you feel good.

9. Get an early start on the day. Nothing can get your Monday off to a bad start quicker than running late. You start the day out in a rush, maybe you don’t have time for breakfast or break your morning routine. Do yourself a favor and wake up earlier. Monday may be the hardest day to do this, but once you are up and going you will appreciate the extra time and arrive at work on time and with less stress.

10. But I don’t want to be here. For some people the Monday morning blues are a symptom of a larger problem. They are not happy with their job. If this is the case brainstorm on that topic. Why do I dislike my job? Is it time for me to find another?

Having a job you do not like can make every day seem like a bad Monday. You do not have to love your job, but if each day brings you serious mental stress and all you think about is how soon before I can get out of here, it is time to consider moving on to a job you will enjoy doing.

Summary: Monday is the most important day of the work week. It is also the most stressful. How many times do your hear “It feels like Monday”? With some practice and planning you can create habits that will help you get your Monday off to a positive start.

Source: Richard Wolfe-Daimpre