Forget touch. Forget gestures. Control your laptop with your eyes

LAS

VEGAS--At CES this year, Tobii , which

has been making technology that

watches what you're looking at on a

screen, is showing off its gaze-

controlled demo laptop and introducing

its eye control interface for Windows 8.

I first met Barbara Barclay, general

manager of Tobii North America, at the

D9 conference last June, and we had a

talk about my reservations over eye

control. On paper, this technology is

incredibly cool and sci-fi- ish, but my

issue is this: We use our eyes to see, not

to control. There's a big cognitive

difference between looking at something

on a screen and touching it (or mousing

to it). Eyes are input devices, not

output. That's why gaze tracking for

analytics makes sense. But for

controlling a computer interface?

I sat with Barclay and Tobii's Anders

Olsson at CES today and got to try the

latest from Tobii. One of the key tenets

with the Windows 8 demo is that it uses

a combination of touch and eyesight for

the interface. To select a tile to launch,

for example, you press down the

Windows key, look at the tile for the

app you want, and then release the key.

That ameliorates the issue of having

your computer go off and do something

when your mind or gaze wanders. It is

easier to look at something on a screen

than it is to mouse over it, in terms of

actual speed and effort, so this should

work.

Tobii works by shooting near-infrared

lights at your eyes, and then uses two

IR cameras to capture "the reflective

point of retina plus the glint off the

cornea," I was told. From this it builds

a 3D model of your eye. Tobii requires

new hardware compared to the

cameras in PCs now; I saw the demo on

a custom-built machine that used to be

an HP laptop. No word yet on what the

premium will be for the technology.

When touchscreens first came out on

laptops, the premium for that

technology was around $200 to $400.

In my rushed demo at a casino cafe

here, I found it actually does work. The

Tobii system knows where you're

looking, and provides some feedback on

that, but it doesn't actually do anything

until you press or release a control. I

did not expect to like it, but I did. It is

intuitive to use, and very fast. Tobii has

done a good job of making your glances

into workable input signals.

Rudz