Friday, January 30, 2009

SWAET 2009 Annouced

The Scandinavian Workshop of Applied Eye-Tracking aims at being a meeting place for graduate students, researchers and others using eye-tracking as a measuring tool. It will be held at the University of Stavanger (May 6- 7th). Keynote speakers at SWAET 2009 are Dr Benjamin Tatler (University of Dundee) and Prof Jukka Hyönä (University of Turku).

Suggested topics for workshop presentations:
  • Reading in various contexts
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Integration of pictures and language
  • Face-to-face interaction and other social contexts
  • Attention (such as top-down/bottom-up factors)
  • Controlling interfaces with eye-tracking
  • Viewer behaviour towards images and video
  • Vehicle and traffic research
  • Human factors; such as air traffic control, ship navigation and pilots
  • Evaluation of user interfaces
  • Cognitive processes such as navigation, planning, problem solving, mental imagery, memory etc.
If you wish to present your research, you have to submit an abstract no later than March 15th 2009. Decisions on acceptance are given on April 1st.

Registration at the conference is € 50 for all delegates except graduate and undergraduate students, who participate free of charge. After April 10th, expect to pay € 80 (students € 30).

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Wearable EOG Goggles: Eye-Based Interaction in Everyday Environments

Andreas Bulling in the Wearable Computing Group at the Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology (ETH) is working on a new Electrooculography-based eye tracking system. This technology relies on the small but measurable electrical currents (potentials) created by the eye musculature. A set of electrodes are attached to the skin and after signal processing this data can be used for controlling computer interfaces or other devices. The obvious advantage of this method of eye tracking compared to the more traditional corneal reflection video-based methods is that its not sensitive to sunlight and may therefor be used outdoors. However, to my knowledge, it provide a lower accuracy, this results in most EOG interfaces relying on eye gestures rather than gaze fixations.

"We want to introduce the paradigm of visual perception and investigations on eye movements as new methods to implement novel and complement current context-aware systems. Therefore, we will investigate the potential but also possible limitations of using eye movements to perform context and activity recognition in wearable settings. Besides recognizing individual activities another focus will be put on long-term eye movement analysis." More information.

Recently Andreas got a paper accepted for the CHI 2009 conference in Boston (April 4-9th) where the system will be demonstrated during the interactivity session. Andreas and the team at ETH are planning to investigate attentive user interfaces (AUI) in mobile settings using wearable systems, such as the prototype demonstrated in the video below.

View on YouTube

SMI gets the International Forum Design Award

Congratulations to the guys at SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) for winning the International Forum 2009 Product Design Award with their iView X™ RED eye tracker.

"The unobtrusive yet elegant design for the stand-alone as well as for the monitor-attached configuration of the eye tracking system convinced the jury. "

The award will be presented at the first day of CeBIT (3rd of March) in Hanover. The system will also be on display for those of you who are attending CeBIT. More information on the International Forum Award.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

The Argentinian Eye Mouse software released (Amaro & Ponieman)

Nicolás Amaro and Nicolás Ponieman at the ORT Argentina, recently got the Chamber of Industry and Trade Argentine-German Award for Innovation 2008 for their work on a low-cost (webcam) headmounted corneal reflection based solution. Best of all the software can be downloaded which will directly benefit those who are in need but cannot afford the state-of-the-art systems currently on the market. As demonstrated by the video below it is capable of running grid-based interfaces, thus it should be adequate for GazeTalk and similar.

View on YouTube

Friday, January 2, 2009

An Unobtrusive Method for Gaze Tracking (N. Chitrik & Y. Schwartzburg)

Nava Chitrik and Yuliy Schwartzburg have in partial fulfillment of their Senior Design Project Requirements constructed a low-cost approach for remote eye tracking at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Electrical Engineering Department.

"The line of a person's gaze is known to have many important applications in artificial intelligence (AI) and video conferencing but determining where a user is looking is still a very challenging problem. Traditionally, gaze trackers have been implemented with devices worn around the user's head, but more recent advances in the field use unobtrusive methods, i.e. an external video camera, to obtain information about where a person is looking. We have developed a simplified gaze tracking system using a single camera and a single point source mounted compactly in the view of the user, a large simplification over previous methods which have used a plurality of each. Furthermore, our algorithms are robust enough to allow head motion and our image processing functions are designed to extract data even from low-resolution or noisy video streams. Our system also has the computational advantage of working with very small image sizes, reducing the amount of resources needed for gaze tracking, freeing them up for applications that might utilize this information.

To reiterate: The main differences between this implementation and similar implementations are that this system uses a histogram method as opposed to edge detection to work with very low resolution video extremely quickly. However, it requires an infrared camera and infrared LED's. (Which can be purchased for less than 25 dollars online.)"

View on YouTube