Boffins kill computer mouse

AN EGGHEAD at Stanford University thinks he has worked out a way of making the mouse redundant by making the computer track your eyeballs, instead.

According to Technology Review, Manu Kumar, a doctoral student who works with computer-science professor Terry Winograd, has a gizmo which lets a punter click links, highlight text, and scroll - simply by looking at the screen and tapping a key on the keyboard.

The set up needs standard eye-tracking hardware, a specialised computer screen with a high-definition camera and an infrared light.

The technology has been around for a while, for people with disabilities, but Kumar wants to get it to a point where it becomes more useful for able-bodied users.

The system uses software called EyePoint that works with standard eye-tracking hardware. A punter looks at a Web link and hold a "hot key" on the keyboard at the same time. The area of the screen that's being looked at becomes magnified. Then, the person pinpoints the focus within the magnified region and releases the hot key, effectively clicking through to the link.

At the moment the technology is not quite there yet. This is because the eye is not really very stable, especially on Monday morning before the second cup of coffee. µ

L'INQ
Technology Review