I used my eyes to control virtual reality, and someday you will too - CNET

Doing magic things with my eyes

I don't get to demo the smartglasses, but I do train with the Oculus headset. First I look around, getting used to a simple interface that involves looking at things, but no blinking required. (In exchange for this early look at the technology, they asked me not to disclose the full details of how Eyefluence's interface works. That's partly why there are no pictures of that here.) Stiehr and Marggraff seem briefly conceed about my eyeglass prescription, though. Mine's an extreme -9. Eyefluence corrects for light, glasses and other occlusions, but mine might be a bit too extreme for the early prototype demo.

Everything does indeed end up working, though a few glances at the coers of my vision seem jittery. I get better the more I use it. Soon enough, I'm scrolling around icons and even opening them. I open a 3D globe. I spin around it using my eyes, resting on different places with quick glances. It almost feels, at times, like telepathy.

Another demo had me try VR whack-a-mole. With something like a regular VR headset, you'd move your head and aim a cursor at things. I try the little arcade game this way, then it's triggered over to eye-motion mode. Suddenly I'm zipping across and bonking the pop-up arcade critters with sweeps of my eyes. An after-the-game set of stats shows I was about 25 percent faster using eye-tracking.

Finally, I open a little game of Where's Waldo? A large poster-size illustration opens up, full of people and things. I'm encouraged to look at something in the picture, then move my eye to a zoom-in icon. The picture zooms on what I was looking at. It feels like a mind-reading magic trick. It doesn't always work on my first go, but when it does it's uncanny.

Eye power

Eyefluence's tech doesn't just track eye motion. It also scans retinas. The combination can be used for biometric security (think enterprise smartglasses that could log you into corporate systems automatically), or for future medical applications. Stiehr, who helped create some of the first automatic defibrillators seen at airports and other public places, has a background in launching medical technology companies. Many of Eyefluence's employees have backgrounds in neurology, Stiehr said, and he sees the company's advances as being part of a solution for diagnosing epilepsy, concussions and Alzheimer's and for possibly helping to retrain patients with autism. The concept of controlling an interface completely with your eyes would be amazing for people who are disabled or paralyzed.

Since Eyefluence's eye-tracking also keeps track of where you're looking -- and how much your pupils are dilated, which can indicate emotion or engagement -- heat maps for advertising, fashion or really anything could be assembled. Imagine glasses that know what you're looking at, and maybe that can even guess what you're feeling.

One ready-to-go feature for eye-tracking that's a lot more practical is called "foveated rendering." It's an ability for VR graphics to focus their higher-resolution rendering to just a small area where you're actually directly looking, and dialing down the resolution around the periphery to save processing power. Our eyes already perform a little bit like this. Our peripheral vision isn't as crisp as what we see in the center of our retinas. I try a demonstration, looking around a virtual castle that's rendered around me. The focus circle of where I'm staring becomes extra crisp, while everything around that goes blurry...like looking through fog. Sliders are adjusted until the effect evens out, and then I can't even tell the rendering trick is happening. I'm assured that it is. The bottom line is that tricks like this could potentially let people run advanced VR graphics on far less powerful PCs down the road.

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