Gaze Detector Lets You Hear With Your Eyes

tinkertim writes "Engadget is reporting that Manabe Hiroyuki has developed a personal 'being' assistant, the wearable headphone gaze detector. The device apparently takes notice of what you look at (and hear) and makes note of the more important events in your life that it records. From the article '[the device] is slightly less elegant than the traditional neural implant, with this system you could not only record the goings on of your days and "bookmark" important events, but also train the cameras to feed you information about your surroundings based on QR codes or possibly eventually object recognition; think of it as augmented aural reality triggered by giving a passing glance.'"

"Important events"

Why do I get the feeling that the main events this will record are hot girls passing by?

Re:"Important events"

This is a bad thing?

But the question is...

When the company that makes the software for this bundles spyware with it, how much are they going to make letting advertisers (and the occasional law enforcement agency) know what you've been looking at?

Re:But the question is...

Yeah, but now they get to work out your type and give you a heads up display to modify billboards appropriately. Just be careful to keep guys out of your field of vision...

Oh, and if you look at too many 17-year-old girls they tell the police.

Nice idea, wrong application

If this were a lot smaller it might be a useful aid, particularly for those with memory problems. But we use something similar for web page design, where it's very useful indeed. By monitoring where the eyes move you can get a very good read on how people use a site and design accordingly.

Scary...

wow this sounds kinda scary in some ways.. what if you look at the goatse guy or tubgirl?!? I don't want to hear THAT!!

But what about "seeing" with our ears...

...so we can be like Dare Devil.

possibly eventually object recognition...

Does it have a speaker that yells, "shwing!" every time you see an awesome pair of breasts?

I'm reminded of

The "Far Side" cartoon where the guy is wearing the Dog Translation Helmet, and all the dogs are saying "Hey!" "Hey!" "Hey!".

Hoax?

To me it looks like a bloke wearing headphones with loads of wires coming out of it. I'm having difficulty believing that this device can record eye movements.

How does this work?

Does this actually follow your gaze without looking at your eyes? Surely the headphones can't be sensitive enough to pick up the neural or nervous signalling?

Still, it seems quite rudimentary compared with other AR projects like Tinmith: http://www.tinmith.net/ [tinmith.net]

does anyone carry a daily recorder?

I know I save all my e-mail, and often refer back to it, especially in my business life, as I have a horrible memory, and may tasks to track. However, I know many business people that prefer to talk rather than write, so it would be really useful for me to record what they tell me.

Could the article be any more vague?

All I see is some dumb looking guy with dumb looking headphones, and no real explanation of what either of them does.

detector running

Gaze detector activated: recording: boobs boobs boobs boobs eyes floor

June the 21st 2006

I'll always remember this day as the first time I realised that there was such a thing as a traditional neural implant. ... And wondered if had been asleep for a decade or two.

No thanks, saw the movie...

"Brainstorm" I think they called it?

Google timeline

Part of the fun of life is developing your own ability to distill the experiences of life into perceptions and integrating them into your own mind and later being able to adapt to future experiences by drawing upon your stored knowledge and being able to behave at least somewhat optimally.

People have being doing this with varying degrees of success for tens of thousands of years.

Now I have google desktop search installed on my laptop, and it has indexed my life. Everything I've ever seen on this machine for the past year, it remembers and knows about and can search for within seconds (CTRL-CTRL anyone?). Gigabytes of history. Every single web page I've ever visited (except those which I've deliberately excluded by using a virtual machine, torpark, etc). It knows more than I've learned (at least with respect to indexable keywords and strings) in the past year.

It's kind of scary sometimes. There are some things you would want to forget. But it's so darn handy.

In the words of The Cat

"So what *is* it?"

Apart from making you look like a twat, I'm still non the wiser as to what this thing actually does!

This Spells Trouble!

God - I definitly would not want my Fiancee to be able to see what/who I was staring at all day.

These files better be secure :)

Autoblogger

Does it also upload these important events to my personal blog?

wtf?

[blah blah] device [yack yack] less elegant [blah] traditional neural implant [yadda yadda yadda] system [hoodlihoo] goings on [fa fa fa] "bookmark" [yackety schmackety] feed you information [gweh] QR codes [ra ra ra] object recognition; [oy oy oy] augmented aural reality [zazoo zazoo] passing glance.

Sweet crackers, it's too early in the morning. Couldn't we have an RIAA story? At least I can spell "RIAA" at 7AM.

Bike rides

This kind of thing could make Lucas Brunelle [digave.com]'s job easier, for better or for worse...

This reminds me of

The movie "Final Cut" with Robin Williams.

Where they implant a chip in your head that records all you do and gives you a movie of their life.

traditional?

From the article '[the device] is slightly less elegant than the traditional neural implant

Umm, where is the research being done, that neural impants that do this are traditional? Did he step out of the future or something?

I've just invented a levitating car (patents pending). Sure, it's less elegant than the traditional flying car, but I've never been a slave to tradition anyway.

Augmented Reality

This is a really cool device, I've been looking forward to this for so long that I've contemplated building it myself.

Remember that augmented reality is what virtual reality isn't: Useful for everyday life. Imagine a device like this linked with a wearable computer. Imagine it puts everyone whose face you look at for more than a second into a face-recognition search to find out whether you know that person, and if so it shows you some details (full name, birthday, any important details you entered into your contacts database to make sure you never forget about this person) via some unobstrusive HUD.

Or imagine shopping with a wearable computer with online connection which can tell you that the gadget you're about to buy sells at $0.50 more next door, but they have 1 year guarantee instead of 6 months and a much better score on customer reviews.

Or, to simplify it again, just imagine having a device with you that records everything you see in a round-robin storage of just a minute or two - suddenly you can store all those moments that happened two seconds before you remembered to grab your digicam.

Augmented reality is a way cool research subject. If I were in university again, this is where I'd be heading.

Oh, great

An ego synonym for the penis enlarger.

Traditional neural implants.

... slightly less elegant than the traditional neural implant...

Wow.

I mean, I knew I was having trouble keeping up with all the latest in gadgetry these days, but I must really be slipping if neural implants went mainstream and I missed it.

I love carpet

Or floors. When I'm in a meeting, or other similarly voice filled event, I tend to spend a lot of time listening and looking at the floor. What would a device like this make of that? Certainly there are some correlations between looking and listening and importance, but...I'm busy listening to NPR as I type this, as I've been browsing, and I haven't looked at the radio ONCE. Hardly means it's unimportant to me though....

The possibilities

Is anyone else thinking of Strange Days (Movie. The possibilities are endless

'being' assistant?

And here I've been being without the benefit of an electronic assistant. I wonder how much more efficiently I could 'be' with this? Could I be twice as often? Twice as quickly? Or does it add another layer of being? Like a multibe-er or something.

Mmmm ... multibeer ...

*sigh* no fun.

Half the fun of taping an encounter with a female is hiding the camera. No fun if you can just plug your skull into your PC and rewind it. Agreed on the Strange Days reference.

Hmm... Metroid Prime?

This makes me think of Samus's Scan Visor. Maybe if you scan your boss, you can find his weak points, so you can take advantage and get a raise. You could find that structural instability in the side of your cubicle, to get to the hidden month-old-takeout-food powerup. You'll know interesting information about your coffee machine after you've scanned it, like who created it, and how it functions.

Recording

Dinner with wife

Recording......
Plate, menu, waitress, menu, wife, waitress, waitress' behind, wife's fist, ceiling, wife's shoe, ceiling, wife's shoe, ceiling, wife's shoe,...

End of transmission

Reminds me of Modems and Fallback

Doesn't sound like a good idea to me, here's why.

When high speed modems were coming in they had a builtin fallback function whereby if the line was noisy they would slow down and keep the channel open. Sounds good right? Only problem was we had modems that were supposed to be on for days or weeks at a time. Since any line sometimes has problems the modems would get slower and slower over time and never get back to being fast, even after the temporary problem MWA'd ("magically went away"). The only solution was to shut down the connection and start it up again.

OK fast forward to the future where everyone is wearing this type of digital "asisstant". It only lets you see and hear what you have previously shown an interest in. Since you only see and hear what you previously were interested in, any new stuff ( The blonde with the hot red skirt, or the hunk in the blue muscle shirt) that you have never seen before but might have wanted to see doesn't come through. Since familiarity breeds boredom you have less and less stuff that you are interested in, so less and less stuff gets through. Sooner or later you have to turn the sucker off and either start the retraining cycle or see how far you can throw it.

Major application

What we seem to have missed here are applications for people who unlike Mr. Hiroyuki are not completely physical able.

Millions of people depend on wheel chairs and personal care workers to do almost everything for them. If this gaze detection could be developed a bit more, these people could type (even those without use of their arms or hands) record conversations selectively, operate home lighting and heating controls, and holler for help if they fall or (as frequently happens) a care person fails to show up.

My wife (and the agency she works for) works with a large population of people for whom technology hasn't quite fulfilled its promise yet. They have great electric wheel chairs and other adaptive technologies, but a real usable interface is still seemingly just around the corner. Except for a few early adopters of substantial means, of course.

But it's... THE FUTURE!

Why does every futurist's vision of life these days sound like just another gadget laden sojourn in Hell?

Welcome to the future, fifth Circle, second lava pit on the left. Just follow the ring tones.

Could be used for a number of things

OK, so you have to make the device smaller. Big deal. That's a year or two. Meanwhile, you can work out the rest of the details. How about training purposes? You throw a pilot trainee in a simulator and see what he was looking at during the run. Did he look at the wrong indicators when things turned bad? Was he busy admiring the upholstery when the bandit snuck in on his 6? What did he look at to verify a friendly? After you work everything out on trainers, why not give it to real pilots for the same purpose? Used with object recognition, it also serves a nice "tell-me-what-I'm-looking-at" function with oh so many military applications here.

lol english is funny

i think the two guys living next door to me are gaze, will this device detect that and let me know?

Darn!

I thought maybe this was something my 12th level Paladin could use against a Basilisk.

Cops?

Couldn't this be used to let you know that there's a cop nearby? Now that's some nifty shit.

Great...

The description of the images snapped for me as "important" would read like:
6/21/2006, img 30048: Cute blonde
6/21/2006, img 30049: Hot Redhead
6/21/2006, img 30050: Could her skirt be any shorter?
6/21/2006, img 30051: Check her out.
6/21/2006, img 30052: Screenshot of incomplete code, yes I should get back to that.
6/21/2006, img 30053: Whoa! her legs are awesome!
...

Do I really need my depravity documented with a chronological image archive?

Yeah... actually, I guess that would be nice.

They Already Have This...

They created this years ago, it's called Acid.

Uhm

I've had one of these devices for quite some time. It's called a memory.