Your Smartphone can now be an Eye Tracking Device

A new Artificial Intelligence Software can enable your smartphone to be an eye tracking device.

Eye-tracking technology can pinpoint the location of people and their gaze. This technology is widely used in psychological experiments and marketing research. Until now this was kept away from consumer applications due to its cost.

This system is developed by researchers at MIT and University of Georgia. They are planning to develop technology to be more accessible, by enabling computer interfaces to help detect signs of incipient neurological diseases or mental illnesses.

As few individuals have the external gadgets that are necessary for this application to run, there isn’t big incentive to develop the application, observed an MIT Graduate student, Aditya Khosla.

That being said, he also mentioned that the team is trying its best to make this technology available to every smartphone user with a front facing camera.

As the application works on the principle of Artificial Intelligence, many training examples. These examples include gaze patterns of 1,500 mobiles.

The researchers report that in the initial round, 800 mobile devices were utilized. The system had a margin of error of 1.5 cm which was a two-fold improvement over previous experiments.

They later acquired data on another 700 people which reduced the margin of error to about a centimetre.

To collect all their training examples, they developed an application for smartphone devices. The application flashes a small dot on the screen asking for user’s attention and then briefly replaces with L or R, asking the user to either swipe left or right. Executing this will ensure that the user has shifted their gaze to left or right. During this, the application constantly monitors and captures images of the user’s face.

Though this application and technology is still in the early stages of development, the researchers believe that this might bring drastic changes to the fields of Psychology and Mental Health.