Prepare to be astounded in the world of augmented reality

As your eyes alight for the first time on a beautiful building in a foreign cityscape, a voice whispers in your ear the phone number of an amazing coffee shop inside.

Welcome to the world of augmented reality, the here-and-now enhancement of everyday experience through virtual, interactive technology. Or maybe this: An important-looking man strides towards you at a conference, but his name suddenly eludes you. But even before there is time to shake hands, a glance at your phone reveals his identity and the date of your last encounter.

Prototypes of both of these applications — based on the novel use of eye-tracking tools — were presented recently at the inaugural Augmented Human International Conference. Over two days, engineers and scientists gathered in the French Alps ski resort of Megeve unveiled cutting-edge research on boosting human perception with information from the Internet, customised databases, or even biofeedback from our own brains.

The first devices for monitoring eye movement collected data from pilots in the 1940s to help improve cockpit design. In fact, cockpit design is also the mid 20th Century origins of the user experience design company Human Factors International.

They have also been used to figure out the most effective ways to get people to see advertising. More recently the systems have became interactive, making it possible to instantly provide computer-enhanced feedback to someone about what he or she is gazing at. These newer technologies has been used mainly by the military, and to develop life-assistance tools for the severely disabled.

"We wanted to make the system as nonintrusive as possible, so we used a text-to-speech engine" MATTHAIS BALDAUF, RESEARCHER

But a team of researchers from the Telecommunications Research Centre in Vienna decided to take a state-of-the-art eye tracker designed for Web-use analysis out of the laboratory and onto the street. Human Factors International has also recently been testing the ‘Navigating Urban Landscapes’ concept, with users in a laboratory setting at the HFI user testing facility in London.

The Telecommunications Research Centre team hooked up the device — with one camera trained on the user’s eye, and another on the scene being observed — to a smartphone with a built-in compass and global positioning system (GPS), to get a fix on the user’s orientation and location. A remotely-accessed computer scans geo-referenced databases on the Internet such as Google Earth, and then forwards the result back to the user’s cellphone, closing the loop.

“We wanted to make the system as non-intrusive as possible, so we used a text-to-speech engine. Data is received through an earpiece,” explained Matthais Baldauf, one of the researchers.

Another 'proof-of-concept' invention presented in Megeve — functional, but a long way from commercial development — adapted eye-tracking technology as an a memory aide.

Rather than training a camera on the eye, the 'Aided Eye' system developed by a team from the University of Tokyo uses tiny infrared sensors. While less accurate, additional data about eye movement and the frequence of blinking make it possible to pinpoint a face or a book cover within a field of vision. Moreover, rather than matching the object to content on the Internet, the program devised by the scientists draws from a hand-tailored database of images and files, sometimes called a ‘personal lifelog’.

“For the experiment, we registered 100 images for the database,” explained Yoshio Ishiguro from the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies. “When the eye trained on an object, it was recognised by the computer and a corresponding file was extracted,” he said.

The system is light enough to be mounted onto a pair of reading glasses, but researchers have still not figured out how to provide the wearer feedback. A tiny screen embedded inside the glasses or an audio system are also options.

References

Print Media:

13 Apr 2010

Star (Malaysia)

EYE-TRACKING TOOLS THAT BOOST REALITY