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If you're interested in eye-tracking, I'm interested in funding you

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Re: If you're interested in eye-tracking, I'm interested in funding you

#131

Post by KaiserPro »

fastball wrote: post #3

Is the lack of mentioning Apple deliberate? It seems like they've already poured a lot of R&D into this for the Vision Pro, which might be exactly the kind of thing the friend needs.

Yes, because:

1) its eye tracking isn't good enough for this kind of application.

2) direct access to the gaze vector is disabled

3) its really intrusive

4) its heavy.

5) it doesn't exist(in consumer world) yet.

The goal is to enable someone who has motor control issues, be able to communicate directly with the outside world. Shoving a heavy skimask that totally obscures the outside world on their face directly stops that.

Not only that, but you'll need to create and keep up to date the software needed to make a communicator. Apple are many thing, but it's new platforms are not stable, rapid os updates will break things.

Re: If you're interested in eye-tracking, I'm interested in funding you

#133

Post by KaiserPro »

soligern wrote: post #9
woodruffw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The context here is ALS; someone with only the ability to move their eyes may not have a couple of months free to wait.

I think that makes sense but a startup is going to have a hard time delivering something better between now and January if they start from scratch. But maybe I’m wrong, it might be a purely software based problem that can be solved quicker.

not really.

There are a bunch of hardware out there to get gaze vectors, the problem is that they rely on a generalised model of the eye. With fine tuning you can go from >5 degree of error, to <1-2

Re: If you're interested in eye-tracking, I'm interested in funding you

#134

Post by sillysaurusx »

supremearkitect wrote: post #130

[flagged]

Hmm. I was curious and started looking for the comments you mention, and was pleasantly surprised to find zero pg hate comments, downvoted or otherwise. People seem pretty on board with billionaires solving problems for disabled people in exchange for mutual upside.

I used to be bothered by those kinds of sentiments too, by the way. The way I got over it was to realize how many people are just bitter, and not because of pg or YC. This is different than having an actual issue with pg or YC — it’s random noise rather than points worth listening to.

Weirder than the haters are the people who reply to his tweets. Some of them post bizarre things. I find it fascinating when people project their own feelings on him, whether it’s hate, admiration, or (my favorite, having been a victim of it myself) misplaced ambition.

Re: If you're interested in eye-tracking, I'm interested in funding you

#137

Post by GnarlyWhale »

ladberg wrote: post #47
pg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not available yet. And in any case if this is the future there should be multiple companies doing it, not just Apple.

I used to work on it and have spent tons of time in the headset. The eye tracking is next-level and it's really the only platform that exists with eye tracking as a primary input method. I'm pretty confident it will greatly improve your friend's quality of life. Because of that, I'm also sure that eye tracking will go mainstream in other areas once the Vision Pro is released once everyone else catches on to it as a g…

This is pretty much exactly why I vehemently disagree with Apple's decision to draw such a firm line in the sand preventing devs from accessing the eye/gaze data directly. I'm part of an academic spin-off start-up that specializes in analyzing gaze and movement data. Locking the gaze information outside of the app sandbox severely hampers the ability to quickly iterate design and UI patterns that could be game changing for accessibility. Hopefully they make accommodations moving forward for these circumstances.

The issue is doubly close to my heart because my father has ALS and is nearly at the point where eye-tracking will be his only means of communicating effectively with the world. While existing Tobii systems work well enough, typing with your eyes is still exhausting to do.

Ultimately I don't think a platform like the vision pro is suitable for ALS patients, especially later term. They cannot support the weight of the headset and/or fatigue will set in rapidly. Many (including my father) also require use of a ventilator, accompanied with a mask that can seal effectively enough to support the positive pressure necessary to inflate their lungs. Unless the form factor for HMD's minimalizes significantly, it will likely interfere with the respirator's efficacy.

Re: If you're interested in eye-tracking, I'm interested in funding you

#138

Post by bacon_waffle »

Edit: Check out Dasher for a much better interface to enter text with a cursor, compared to a virtual keyboard.

https://dasher.acecentre.net/ , source at https://github.com/dasher-project/dasher

---

I remember seeing a program years ago, which used the mouse cursor in a really neat way to enter text. Seems like it would be far better than clicking on keys of a virtual keyboard, but I can't remember the name of this program nor seem to find it...

Will probably get some of this wrong, but just in case it rings a bell (or someone wants to reinvent it - wouldn't be hard):

The interface felt like a side-scrolling through through a map of characters. Moving left and right controlled speed through the characters; for instance moving to the left extent would backspace, and moving further to the right would enter more characters per time.

Up and down would select the next character - in my memory these are presented as a stack of map-coloured boxes where each box held a letter (or, group of letters?), say 'a' to 'z' top-to-bottom, plus a few punctuation marks. The height of each box was proportional to the likelihood that letter would be the next you'd want, so the most likely targets would be easier+quicker to navigate to. Navigating in to a box for a character would "type" it. IIRC, at any instant, you could see a couple levels of letters, so if you had entered c-o, maybe 'o' and 'u' would be particularly large, and inside the 'o' box you might see that 'l' and 'k' are bigger so it's easy to write "cool" or "cook".

(I do hardware+firmware in Rust and regularly reference Richard Hamming, Fred Brooks, Donald Norman, Tufte. Could be up for a change)

Re: If you're interested in eye-tracking, I'm interested in funding you

#140

Post by matthewbarras »

minihat wrote: post #116
mikpanko wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a PhD in brain-computer interfaces, including EEG and implanted electrodes. BCI research to a big extent focuses on helping paralyzed individuals regain communication. Unfortunately, EEG (including P300) doesn’t provide sufficient signal-to-noise ratio to support good communication speeds outside of the lab with Faraday cages and days/weeks of de-noising including removing eye-movement artifacts in the recordin…

+1 from a fellow BCI PhD. EEG tech is not ready for this application yet.

+1 +1 from another fellow BCI PhD. EOG over EEG at the moment (likely forever, non-invasively).
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