SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) has announced the launch of its OEM Eye Tracking Platform. The technology can now be integrated into “all consumer display formats”, the company says.
The platform is pretty much what it sounds like: It enables user eye-tracking for devices and applications that integrate it. There’s a wide range of potential applications of gaze-based interaction technology, but perhaps the biggest, at least for consumers, is in augmented reality. Holding up a smartphone or tablet and having data superimposed over its screen based on where the user is looking could enable extremely accurate new streams of real-world data in real time (and may help to fully realize what Jean Baudrillard called ‘hyperreality‘). It also has powerful applications in virtual reality, helping to better orient the virtual world in which the user is situated, and it could provide a wealth of useful data to workers employing the technology in the field; for example, pointing a surveyor to key landmarks.
SMI has brought its technology to market quickly, given that it was first announced just this year. And while its technology has the potential to be very impactful in medical research on cognitive disorders, its use in augmented and virtual reality systems could prove popular as well, especially if devices like Google Glass ever take off in the mass market.
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