Your Blink Is My Command
New Technology Can Have Appliances Reading Your Thoughts
From: ABCNews.com - 06/13/2003

Ted Selker of MIT and Roel Vertegaal of Ontario's Queen's University are
focused on the development of context-aware computers that can pick up on
"implicit communication" relayed through eye or body movements to carry out
commands. Much of the technology the two colleagues are working on
incorporates eye-recognition systems. For example, a toy dog has been
modified to bark when it receives infrared signals as a person wearing
special eyeglasses stares at it; it is also programmed to stop barking if the
person is blinking a lot, or is not looking in its direction. The dog can
tell when two people wearing the glasses are looking at each other because
lights on both pairs blink when eye contact is made. Selker and Vertegaal are
also developing Attentive TV, in which the eyes of a person viewing a program
on a computer are monitored with a camera; Vertegaal explains that the
program starts or stops depending on where the eyes are focused. Another
technology being worked on is "Eyepliances" that allow users to activate or
deactivate appliances by staring at them and issuing voice commands.
Meanwhile, users can more efficiently deal with interruptive phone calls
through Eyeproxy, a device with quivering eyeballs that takes messages or
patches calls through depending on whether the user decides to look at them.
The technology Selker and Vertegaal are developing is five to 15 years away
from commercialization. 

Click Here to View Full Article
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/SciTech/GMA030613Eye_proxy.html

Caption: The director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
context-aware computing lab demonstrates eye-recognition technology products. 

To read more about the attentive user interface work by Ted Selker and Roel
Vertegaal, see the March 2003 issue of Communications of the ACM. 
http://www.acm.org/cacm/toc/2003/3march_toc_03.html