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May 26, 2005

Research from Up North

The Globe and Mail: Watching you, watching me:

An overview of some research by Dr. Vertegaal at the Human Media Laboratory at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. One commercial spinoff is the eyeBox by Xuluk:

The company's first product is the $799 (U.S.) eyeBox, a USB digital camera that senses when people are looking at it, and that can be used to control programs through head and eye movements. It also plans to bring eye-contact sensors to market that can be stuck to an object to detect whether someone is looking at it. Dr. Vertegaal says potential uses include psychological experiments or safety provisions, such as ensuring a machine is being monitored or a driver is alert.

The device could have other uses too, such as recording the interaction between people -- say, a police officer's contact with citizens or suspects. And Dr. Vertegaal is talking to researchers about using the eyeBlog to help treat autism, a developmental disorder affecting social interaction and communication. People with autism have difficulty making eye contact with others, he says, and an eyeBlog could track their ability to do so.

The eyeBlog is just one of the projects under way at the Human Media Lab. In another project called the Attentive Cubicle, an overhead camera observes the movements of people sitting in adjoining cubicles. If both turn to face the partition that divides the cubicles, the normally opaque divider becomes transparent (it uses privacy glass, based on liquid-crystal technology) and their headsets shut off to allow them to talk. "You could say," Dr. Vertegaal says, "we're trying to develop more sociable computers."

Posted by rshah at May 26, 2005 08:39 PM

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