Eye-tracking gadget knows just what you're longing for

No more sneaking peeks at toys in the mall: SideWays, a new eye-tracking device, will catch you at it. As soon as you walk up to it, it automatically starts tracking what you peer at ? which could allow shop owners to show you adverts on a video screen for products that you seem interested in.

Andreas Bulling of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbr?cken, Germany, and colleagues at Lancaster University in the UK created the prototype device. SideWays uses a conventional video camera and a computer vision program the team developed, which finds your pupils by recognising the corners of your eyes and where they sit relative to your face. The process only causes a short delay, after which it begins tracking your gaze.

Eye-tracking is not new, but most devices that do it need calibrating and only work with one person's gaze. The SideWays prototype has been able to track the gaze of fourteen people of various heights, ages and eye colours, who interacted with it simply by looking at a series of CD covers on a screen. The prototype was unveiled today at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems conference in Paris, France.

Bulling envisages that the system will be mainly used in gaze-controlled interactive advertising displays, much like the album display his group created. "It's a very simple and natural way to interact," he says.

Eye-tracking won't replace touchscreens; instead, it will allow people to interact with a display too far away to touch, or give rise to touch-gaze hybrids. Advertisers can also use the system to keep tabs on which items on the screen most interest passers-by.

The group next plans to modify the system so that it can track the gazes of multiple people simultaneously. This could allow more complex advertisements or even eye-controlled games.

People wearing glasses remain a challenge for the system, says Bulling, as certain frames and reflections can stymie the recognition program. What's more, the system can only track horizontal eye movements at the moment. The pupil's vertical movement is more subtle, although a camera with higher resolution may be able to detect it, says Bulling.

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