For the average person, the prospect of controlling your mobile phone’s music player and camera with a flick of the eye-balls is just a ridiculously lazy alternative to a swift finger jab or two. For the disabled, however, eye-controlled mobile tech opens the doors to a whole new world of productivity and independence.
NTT DoCoMo, always pushing the innovation envelope in the mobile field, is working on just the sort of eye-tracking tech that could eventually give disabled persons a working alternative to button-based handsets. The Frontier Technology Research Group, headed by Dr. Masaaki Fukumoto, is a research arm within NTT DoCoMo that explores new technologies – especially in “wearable computing.”
With the aid of the cumbersome-looking headgear that you see pictured above, Fukumoto is able to control a music player with eye movements alone. The head-mounted contraption tracks eye movement by way of the electrical impulses that are used by the brain to control the eyes. And, the technology can even be used to actively aim a cameraphone’s camera at a specific object, say a QR code, and take a picture.
Combined with the carrier’s other research initiatives like UbiButton, the wristwatch that detects finger movements (which has possible applications as a virtual keyboard), and the Yubi-Wa, a wearable device that turns the fingers in to a cellphone, DoCoMo is poised to redefine what we have come to expect from mobile devices and how we interact with our environment.
Commercial applications for Fukumoto’s eye-tracking technology are a few years off, and we’re looking forward to doing away with these awkward appendages called fingers.
Thanks, Ami!