I do hardware. I do software. I do computer vision. I built some software that ran on a cellphone used by LEO (law enforcement officers) to determine if the person they are quizzing is inebriated or impaired through controlled substances by examining the person's eyes and having them focus on images displayed on the phone screen. I've done eye tracking using fully custom solutions and also through a few of the off-the-shelf SDKs such as GazeSense from eyeware and a few other SDKs.
The problem is not the eye-tracking, it is reasonably easy to build robust systems that can do that easily enough, even with custom hardware under all sorts of lighting conditions. The hard part is the UX if you are trying to build something that isn't hampered by current UI paradigms.
Rapid typing and menus of custom actions with just eye movement, though fatiguing, shouldn't be hard to solve, and then render the output however you want; text, text to speech, commands issued to an machine, etc. Making a usable user interface to do anything else, that's where the rubber hits the road.
@pg, which software is your friend using? If it is anything like I've looked in to in the past, it's over-priced accessibility crap with a UI straight out of the 1990s.
The problem is not the eye-tracking, it is reasonably easy to build robust systems that can do that easily enough, even with custom hardware under all sorts of lighting conditions. The hard part is the UX if you are trying to build something that isn't hampered by current UI paradigms.
Rapid typing and menus of custom actions with just eye movement, though fatiguing, shouldn't be hard to solve, and then render the output however you want; text, text to speech, commands issued to an machine, etc. Making a usable user interface to do anything else, that's where the rubber hits the road.
@pg, which software is your friend using? If it is anything like I've looked in to in the past, it's over-priced accessibility crap with a UI straight out of the 1990s.