Your devices already track your location and communication — why not what you're looking at, too? That's the promise of the Tobii Glasses 2, a pair of high-tech glasses that can track your eyes.
Why would you ever want to do such a thing? You probably wouldn't, but researchers of visual systems are clamoring for that kind of information — what, for instance, a person spends the most time looking at when they're watching TV while holding a tablet.
The glasses are designed primarily for those kinds of scenarios: research projects, testing rooms and simulators — where the thing being looked at isn't just a computer or tablet screen, which would be better served by non-wearable eye tracking like Tobii's EyeX. If you want to study what part of a person's face people look at in various social situations, for example, the Tobii Glasses 2 can tell you.
"What you're actually watching is the overlay of the gaze on the video," explains Barbara Barclay, general manager of Tobii North America. "The glasses themselves have no obstruction on the peripheral, so [they] can eye-track a wide area."
Although Tobii has had an eye-tracking pair of smart glasses for a while, the Tobii Glasses 2 has some nice upgrades. Each eye is now tracked by two cameras, which means even if the wearer adjust the glasses a little, they'll have a better chance of tracking your gaze. At 1.6 ounces, they're also extremely light.
The best part of the upgrade is real-time tracking. A researcher can watch what a person's looking at — with the gaze point continuously market onscreen — on a tablet or laptop as they're looking at it, the footage transmitted wirelessly from the glasses. The device also saves the footage to an SD card.
And what about when it comes time to analyze all this valuable eye-tracking data? Tobii can help there, too, but to get serious analysis software, you're going to have to pay extra. The basic Live View version of the Tobii Glasses 2 costs $14,900, but the Premium Analytics package is $29,900.
That's well north of even the notoriously expensive Google Glass, but if you're in the market for wearable eye tracking, there aren't that many games in town (although Berlin-based SMI offers an alternative). Tobii also offers the Premium Analytics package as a subscription for $800 a month.
Tobii plans to open up the Glasses 2, and the software that powers them, to developers later this year, with an SDK coming in October. That will allow manufacturers to integrate Tobii's platform into their own wearables, which could eventually lead to augmented-reality gaming headsets and smart glasses that can display information about exactly what you're looking at.
"That will allow people who are doing more complex interactions to take the platform of the glasses and do all kinds of things," says Barclay.
Tobii builds several different kinds of eye-tracking technology. The company just began shipping the EyeX, an eye tracker intended for PCs, to developers.
Image: TOBII