Eye tracking is essentially a sensor technology. Using it makes it easier to figure out where the eyes are focused. Eye trackers are essentially versatile and can be used for multiple applications, such as education, medicine, psychology and gaming.
Information about a number of factors can be obtained by eye trackers, such as a person’s focus, attention, consciousness and drowsiness. This information has many applications, such as creating user interfaces for computers. They would be more efficient, intuitive and engaging as compared to the user interfaces that are currently used.
Hands free communication and gaining a deeper understanding of human behaviour are some of the other important applications of eye trackers. For hands free communication, the gaze point is used as a pointer over the computer screen. A user can then interact with a computer or other digital devices, without using his hands to provide an input.
Let us take a look at how eye trackers work.
The key intention of eye trackers is to figure out the gaze point of the eyes. They involve hardware such as custom designed sensors and projectors, that are programmed with embedded algorithms. It is these algorithms that act as the intrinsic thought process for the system. By using the algorithms, an interpretation of the image stream, as generated by sensors is done.
Cameras take a high resolution image of a user’s eyes and the pattern that they form. The eyes position is then figured out by use of mathematical algorithms, image processing and machine learning, and the gaze point is correspondingly obtained.