Control your computer with your face and head -it's the future!

As if to show nothing is new in the world of technology, eye tracking and gesture control date back decades. But if Apple's on board, maybe their time has finally come, suggests Nicole Kobie

- Nicole Kobie

Forget typing and mousing. We’ve been trying for years to come up with new ways to interface with computers, be it eye-trackers, mind-reading tech or VR-powered immersive systems. And among PC Pro staff (past and present), it’s become a joke. We once even ran this headline: “Control your computer with your face and head!”

Yet here I am, typing into a laptop and staring into a monitor, just like a chump from the 1980s. But perhaps not for much longer if Apple and Google have their way, with announcements on eye-tracking plus head and face movement recognition.

Such technologies were created for people with accessibility challenges, and that’s also the origin of eye trackers and brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Hopefully, by integrating such accessibility tools into mainstream tech, iPads and other computing devices will be easier for everyone to use – even if the rest of us are still tapping around the display.

Eyes on the prize

In May, Apple announced that eye-tracking technologies would be among a range of accessibility features coming to iPads and iPhones this year. Eye Tracking, as Apple cleverly calls it, will be built into the devices, powered by on-device machine learning, and using a front-facing camera. After a quick calibration, users can navigate iOS and apps with just a look, using a feature called Dwell Control.

Eye-tracking tech has been in development for more than a century. Researchers first began trying to track eye movements in the 1870s as part of studies hoping to better understand how we read. By the end of the 1890s, a researcher called Edmund Huey had test subjects wear special contact lenses with an embedded aluminium indicator to track movement – though it was so uncomfortable enough that he apparently gave subjects cocaine to tolerate his studies.