In the future, eye-tracking technology may replace the mouse and the keyboard, according to London-based scientists and tech experts.
An infra-red, eye-tracking headset has been used by scientists from Imperial College London to recognize how the eye moves during a task, reports BBC News.
The scientists wanted to achieve insight into visual knowledge – the way we see things and translate the information into actions.
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Professor Guang-Zhong Yang, a scientist in the department of computing at Imperial College, believes eye-tracking technology could assist the way we communicate with machines, such as computers.
Yang said, “Eye-trackers will one day be so reliable and so simple that they will become yet another input device on your computer, like a much more sophisticated mouse.”
However, the findings will initially be used in keyhole and robotic surgery.
Yang added: “If you want to operate on a moving object using keyhole surgery, such as the beating heart to do a coronary bypass, you want to have a stable view.
“We could have the camera move in correspondence with the heart’s rhythm, so what you see is a stationary picture.”
Potential applications include warning drivers that are nodding off by installing an eye-tracker in a car dashboard and allowing fighter pilots to aim missiles by just looking at the target.