Eye tracking

The ability to track the eye movement of the Windows user provides potential benefits for new user interfaces that can empower people with disabilities and create new experiences for gaming and other application interactions.

Eye Control can be used to carry out the same tasks that were previously accomplished with a keyboard and mouse. To enable this functionality, the PC will requires a compatible eye tracker, which may be built into the existing camera or available as an additional piece of hardware:

  • Eye control launchpad: When you turn on Eye control, the launchpad will appear on the screen. This allows you to access the mouse, keyboard, and text-to-speech and to reposition the UI to the opposite side of the screen.
 
  • Eye control interaction model: To interact with the UI for Eye control, simply look at the UI with your eyes until the button activates.
  • Eye control mouse: To control the mouse, select the mouse from the launchpad, tracing your eyes on the screen where you want the cursor to be placed, fine tune the position, and select what action you want to take (left click, double click, right click, or cancel).
  • Eye control keyboard: To use the keyboard, select the keyboard from the launchpad, and pause at the characters you want to type.
  • Eye control shape-writing: Type faster with your eyes by shape-writing on the Eye control keyboard. You can form words in the same way you would with a finger on a touch screen; by pausing on the first and last character of the word, and simply glancing at letters in between. A hint of the word predicted will appear on the last key of the word. If the prediction was incorrect, you can simply select an alternative prediction provided.
  • Eye control text-to-speech: To use text-to-speech, select text-to-speech from the launchpad. From here, you can use the keyboard to type sentences and have them spoken aloud. At the top are phrases that are spoken aloud immediately and can be edited to say different words. This uses the default text-to-speech voices, which can be changed in Settings | Time & Language | Speech | Text-to-speech.
  • Eye control settings: Access settings from the Fn keyboard page to adjust the dwell times, turn on/off shape-writing, and turn on/off the gaze cursor used to test hardware calibration.

This solution is going to provide some great opportunities for changing the way we interact with computers; give it a try and see which scenarios work best for your users.