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Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

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Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#21

Post by dmicah »

jsheard wrote: post #14
dagmx wrote: post #2

This is one major advantage to Apple sharing a foundation across all their devices. Vision Pro introduced eye tracking to their systems as a new input modality, and now it trickles down to their other platforms. I am surprised CarPlay didn’t have voice control before this though.

Is this really likely to be downstream of the Vision Pro implementation? I would think that eye-tracking with specialized hardware at a fixed position very close to the eye is very different to doing it at a distance with a general purpose front facing camera.

Typically eye-trackers work by illuminating the eyes with near infrared light and using infrared cameras. This creates a higher contrast image of the pupils, etc. I assume Apple is doing this in the Vision Pro. Eye-tracking can also be done with just visible light, though. Apple has the benefit of knowing where all the user interface elements are on screen, so eye-tracking in this on the iPhone or iPad doesn't need to be high precision. Knowledge of the position of the items can help to reduce the uncertainty of what is being fixated on.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#22

Post by andrewmunsell »

simlevesque wrote: post #8
dagmx wrote: post #2

This is one major advantage to Apple sharing a foundation across all their devices. Vision Pro introduced eye tracking to their systems as a new input modality, and now it trickles down to their other platforms. I am surprised CarPlay didn’t have voice control before this though.

CarPlay devices aren't really powerful.

CarPlay is rendered by the phone itself, so it's not strictly a function of how powerful the car infotainment is. You've been able to talk to Siri since the beginning of CarPlay so additional voice control is really just an accessibility thing

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#25

Post by snoman »

xnx wrote: post #9

I love accessibility features because they might be the last features developed solely with the benefit of the user in mind. So many other app/os features are designed to steal your attention or gradually nerf usefulness.

Every attention thief is absolutely thrilled at the idea of tracking your eyes. Let’s all imagine the day where the YouTube free tier pauses ads when you’re not actively looking at them.

Shit. I’m turning into one of those negative downers. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much internet today.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#26

Post by ryandrake »

roughly wrote: post #17

Accessibility settings are really a gold mine on iOS for device customization (yes, I agree, they shouldn’t be limited to accessibility). I’m particularly interested in the motion cues and the color filters for CarPlay - I have color filters set up to enable every night as kind of a Turbo-night shift mode (deep orange-red color shift), would love to do the same for CarPlay. I also completely forgot iOS had a magnifie…

Accessibility features tend to be superpowers though, and I'm glad Apple gates them behind permissions and opt-ins. We all know of applications who try to trick the user into granting them inappropriate access to the device through the Accessibility APIs. I think DropBox still begs you to grant them Accessibility access so its tendrils can do who-knows-what to your system.

With great power comes great responsibility.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#27

Post by stacktrust »

Loughla wrote: post #19
stacktrust wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developed solely with the benefit of the user in mind Hopefully accessibility features are never artificially segmented to higher priced devices.

At least in the US, they kind of can't be. The disability community is pretty up front about lawsuits.

iOS 17 audio image descriptions for blind people via Image Magnifier should work on all iPhones, but do not work on iPhone SE3 and iPhone 11 Pro. Audio image descriptions do work in iPhone 12 Pro. Lidar in 12 Pro increases accuracy, but should not be mandatory. Hopefully this is a bug that can be fixed, since text descriptions were still functional on the lower-end devices.

Source: purchased devices until finding one that worked, since Apple docs indicated the feature should work on all iPhones that can run iOS 17.

Edit: audio descriptions in Magnifier are non-functional on iPad Air, working on M2 iPad Pro.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#28

Post by droopyEyelids »

Shank wrote: post #13

> Vehicle Motion Cues is a new experience for iPhone and iPad that can help reduce motion sickness for passengers in moving vehicles. This excites me so, so much! I can't really use my phone as a passenger in a car without getting motion sick after 1-2 minutes. This seems like it might be a promising thing to try.

Have you noticed any correlation between how hungry you are and how fast motion sickness kicks in?

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#30

Post by Tagbert »

snoman wrote: post #25
xnx wrote: post #9

I love accessibility features because they might be the last features developed solely with the benefit of the user in mind. So many other app/os features are designed to steal your attention or gradually nerf usefulness.

Every attention thief is absolutely thrilled at the idea of tracking your eyes. Let’s all imagine the day where the YouTube free tier pauses ads when you’re not actively looking at them. Shit. I’m turning into one of those negative downers. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much internet today.

If this is at all like the eye tracking in Vision Pro, it is only available to the OS and apps are not given access to the data.
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