Watch Someone Play Fruit Ninja With His Eyes
It’s all touchscreen this and touchscreen that in the world of smartphones and tablets.
The Eye Tribe, for one, is sick of it. For a few years now, the company has offered an eye-tracking add-on for Windows devices aimed at developers. Now the company is opening up its devices to Google’s Android mobile operating system.
We got a chance to look at the company’s latest offering. It’s a tiny dongle that plugs into an Android device’s charging port. Once in, it calibrates with your eyes, and then you’re pretty much good to go.
The below demo is running on a Galaxy Note II, a large smartphone that Samsung released in 2012. According to a representative for The Eye Tribe, the company purposefully chose an older device to show that you don’t need the latest and greatest hardware to run its devices.
Indeed, the demo runs exactly as advertised. Fruit Ninja, which you typically play by swiping your finger across the screen, is a pretty good demo. After a second or two, you pretty much get the idea: Look at a fruit and cut that sucker open with your eyes. Pretty neat.
A couple of caveats: One, the dongle isn’t supposed to be a shipping product, something you can buy on its own. For The Eye Tribe, it’s more a proof of concept that the company hopes to use to persuade smartphone makers to incorporate it directly into their mobile devices. The Eye Tribe has shown its system to manufacturers like Samsung in the hopes that, say, the next Note will make casual gaming a lot more fun.
Second, and slightly more disappointingly, the company did a little fudging on this specific demo, adding some “noise” to the proceedings, so you can slice up fruit with just a look, rather than swiping your eyes across it.
Interestingly, unlike other eye-tracking technologies, there’s no blink-to-choose functionality. On systems from competitors like Tobii, you’re able to blink your eyes in order to click or push a button on the screen. Not so here: For mobile devices, The Eye Tribe is more interested in offering a combination of eye tracking and touch.
The Eye Tribe is also looking to expand beyond phones and tablets, and smart televisions would also make sense for a product like this.
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