New generations of laptops and smartphones will have eye tracking technology as a standard feature. Human eye motion tracking technology has gained much interest from firms in the past year.
Giant tech firms acquired a number of tracking startups in the past year, and released a few software and devices that features this technology, Tech Crunch reported. Eye tracking company Tobii Tech vice president Oscar Werner detailed two main benefits of eye tracking technology, which are making devices aware of the user's interest at any moment and providing new means to interact with content. This means the communication bandwidth between the device and the users will increase.
VR is a big thing in 2016 with companies releasing items such as the PlayStation VR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift. With the rise of VR technology, eye tracking innovations will definitely be a standard component of advanced headsets, Must Tech News reported. Soon, it is expected that eye tracking will be an integral part in devices such as desktop monitors, laptops, and smartphones to overhaul how people communicate with their devices.
According to Werner, eye tracking used to be just a promising technology. However, it is now being used in commercial products in a broad range of consumer segments at the same time simultaneously. Digital advertising company Impax Media chief executive officer Dominic Porco detailed some of the main reasons for the increasing popularity of eye tracking technology among big firms. Some of the major factors include being a cost effective hardware, easier and faster way of using date to create algorithm models, and bringing new innovative open source software platforms.
According to Porco, companies like NVIDIA released products that has excellent GPUs at more affordable price to increase image recognition speed capabilities. He also said that crowd-sourcing marketplace like Amazon made possible the collection of bigger and broader datasets to develop recognition algorithms. These developments lets researchers and engineers to experiment and implement eye tracking technologies at a faster pace.
However, just like any technology, eye tracking technology must fullfil specific uses and demands to grow faster. For the case of eye tracking technology, the opportunities for growth seem to be abundant.
