SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) chose this week's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) conference in Los Angeles to launch an eye-tracking feature for the Epson Moverio BT-200 head-mounted display.
Eye-tracking functionality brings a new level of quality and efficiency to augmented reality, permitting multimodality hands-free interaction with context-sensitive displays, according to the company. Researchers and professionals can integrate both gaze and attention in augmented reality applications.
The ability to accurately overlay and add content to objects, as if pinning it to them, is a critical function in augmented realty that requires precise knowledge about the user's physiognomy and gaze, SMI said. Advanced eye-tracking algorithms perform these functions and add continuous adaptation of the visualization to the user's biometric information, improving upon conventional display calibration routines that are both cumbersome and error-prone.
Manufacturing, logistics, technical service, and medical and other professional fields require these visual orientation, search, and inspection procedures that have traditionally been difficult and error-prone.
Eye tracking allows for objective assessment and documentation of what is seen, while gaze overlay enables transfer of expertise that can make expert knowledge and procedures explicit to others, SMI said.
