Pushing the worlds of makers and consumers together, 4tiitoo has developed a new eye tracking system to operate your home computer, but their Kickstarter campaign offers a few unique options. At the lower contribution levels, backers can get access to the NUIA Apps and their App development platform. At the highest levels, contributors get access to the closed beta program of the NUIA SDK, as well as the full working system. Really, there is something for everybody.
The NUIA eyeCharm is a plug-and-play system that utilizes a Kinect (or infrared camera and microphone array of your choice) to allow eye tracking in everyday computing. 4tiitoo started in 2007 with a focus on next generation user experiences. CEO, Tore Meyer explains, “Knowing, that the sensors for eye tracking would soon get to consumer availability within the next couple years, we started including eye tracking as well as gestures and speech recognition into our concepts and started to develop the NUIA middle layer to create a user experience based on these sensors in 2011.” Now, the NUIA eyeCharm is a low cost alternative to get the people started with eye tracking.
During the design phase, hardware testing was done using rapid prototyping technologies and existing components (ie. lenses) to evaluate feasibility. On the software side the company relied on the extensive testing setup from the NUIA technology that was already in place for eye trackers from SMI, Tobii, and existing 4tiitoo applications. “We develop in a Scrum-ban process, so algorithm development is split in different projects for the different tasks like image-based detection, gaze prediction, and in-app intent evaluation and prediction,” says Meyer.
The NUIA SDK is a powerful multimodal development kit with support for MS Visual Studio and Qt Creator and bindings for C, C++, C#, .Net and Java. “We have a strong open source background that we utilized in this project.” With the goal to rapidly increase the world of dedicated eye tracking applications, the SDK has two fundamentally different parts. Meyer explains, “The first part is used to directly include eye tracking into applications that are written by the developer.” While eye tracking output can be accessed directly, developer focus is also on a higher level abstraction to make creation of eye tracking enabled applications easy. “This goes as far as providing extended GUI elements that have eye tracking and also gesture and speech features hooked into them.”
The second part is about extension to existing applications where the source code/binary cannot be changed. “Extensions allow the developer to define special areas. For example, in a Microsoft Office application, extensions can be programmed to react differently to varying forms of a gaze, by scrolling or making a second mouse cursor available for the selection of a tool,” says Meyer.
Thought the NUIA eyeCharm just reached its goal of $100,000 today, the campaign is open until Sunday, April 7, and backers can still snag a version of the eyeCharm.
Support tht NUIA eyeCharm at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/4tiitoo/nuia-eyecharm-kinect-to-eye-tracking.
