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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

#161

Post by Nowado »

matthewbarras wrote: post #140
minihat wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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).

++ with mere MA in cog sci and psychology. If you really wanted to get EEG to work for typing, maybe you could train someone to map thinking about specific kinds of things to the keyboard, but that would be an extremely weird experience. Eyeball is going to have the best signal about eyeball-related motor cortex we can access.

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

#162

Post by yyyk »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #159
yyyk wrote: post #155

I suspect the real moneymakers for such startups have very little to do with ALS. ALS demand is fortunately small, and can't lead to VC desired growth curve. Imagine instead using it in a classroom to ensure the kids pay attention. Or making sure you see the advertisement.

> Imagine instead using it in a classroom to ensure the kids pay attention. Imagine being a parent and being ok with this? The real "moneymakers" in eye-tracking have always been and will continue to be Defense applications for better or worse.

>>Imagine instead using it in a classroom to ensure the kids pay attention.

>Imagine being a parent and being ok with this?

I'm sure there are many tiger-style parents which would be perfectly ok, nay, thrilled!, with this.

---

I didn't describe a utopian scenario. More like a dystopian one. The Defense applications do exist, but I expect the advertisers to dominate as they usually do.

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

#163

Post by sam_goody »

So, guy who has deployed eye-scanning machines all over Africa and has found that many of them have been hacked and are giving incorrect responses suddenly has a friend with ALS and is willing to fund better quality eye tracking?

Either:

    - Part of the whole world-coin thing was privately trying to get the data to help his friend
    - He doesn't want to say "looking to develop eye tracking tech for my world-coin scam", since most devs won't touch that thing. Conveniently found a "friend" with ALS.
Saying, on behalf of a friend, that he doesn't believe PG.

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

#164

Post by sokoloff »

lostdog wrote: post #157

I would love to hear pg's analysis of the business case for this company. By my math, 5k people in the US are diagnosed per year, and if your keyboard costs $1k, then your ARR is $5m, and maybe the company valuation is $50m. Numerically, this is pretty far from the goal of a typical YC company. I hate to be so cold-hearted about the calculations, but I've had a few friends get really passionate about assistive tech,…

I have absolutely no idea of the state of play of eye-based input devices, but I wouldn't expect an entire eye-input keyboard system to be anywhere near as cheap as $1K, but rather a figure 20-100x that.

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

#165

Post by dimask »

What do you think are some challenges that an eyetracker in this specific context has to face? What is your friend mostly struggling with the current solutions? Are there tracking specific challenges related to ALS? Is it mostly a UI/"better prediction" interface issue?

With my group we are developing an eyetracker for studying developmental and clinical populations, which typically present challenges to conventional eyetrackers. It is a spin off from our academic work with infants, and we already have a study almost done that uses it. We are still into the very beginning phase in terms of where this may lead us, but we are interested in looking into contexts where eyetracking for different reasons may be more challenging.

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

#166

Post by dimask »

rsync wrote: post #122

So you're saying there's a final frontier in the mapping of intention and the discernment of preferences ... and you'd like some bright young things to explore that possibility space under the guise of ( unimpeachable good cause ) ? Go to hell. Unless, of course, you'd like to commit the funded work to the free commons, unencumbered by patents and copyrights, and free to use by any entity for any purpose. That's what…

Only that this is already being done for "nefarious" (read advertising) purposes. You do not need any "good excuse" to do just that, just money. And, essentially, being in the commons or not is consequential in how it is to be used. There are a million of topics and cases one is warranted to be suspicious and argumentative against, than when talking about dealing with medical conditions.

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

#167

Post by losvedir »

sam_goody wrote: post #163

So, guy who has deployed eye-scanning machines all over Africa and has found that many of them have been hacked and are giving incorrect responses suddenly has a friend with ALS and is willing to fund better quality eye tracking? Either: - Part of the whole world-coin thing was privately trying to get the data to help his friend - He doesn't want to say "looking to develop eye tracking tech for my world-coin scam", s…

I dunno, they seem like pretty different domains to me, despite both looking at the eye. Generating an image of the eye that's consistent across different scans in different environments but different from person to person, is one challenging problem. Figuring out where two pupils are in tandem while handling saccades and different focal depths is a different challenging problem. The former is a detailed static view of an eye. The latter is a less detailed picture of the eye itself (probably pretty easy to look at an eye and identify the pupil) but a complex dynamic algorithmic problem.

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

#168

Post by sam_goody »

losvedir wrote: post #167
sam_goody wrote: post #163

So, guy who has deployed eye-scanning machines all over Africa and has found that many of them have been hacked and are giving incorrect responses suddenly has a friend with ALS and is willing to fund better quality eye tracking? Either: - Part of the whole world-coin thing was privately trying to get the data to help his friend - He doesn't want to say "looking to develop eye tracking tech for my world-coin scam", s…

I dunno, they seem like pretty different domains to me, despite both looking at the eye. Generating an image of the eye that's consistent across different scans in different environments but different from person to person, is one challenging problem. Figuring out where two pupils are in tandem while handling saccades and different focal depths is a different challenging problem. The former is a detailed static view…

He currently has to put up with fakers, dupes that are not picked up, etc.

Once he can require you to focus on a series of letters with your eyes, it will be harder to fake, easier to pick up dupes. Aside for the fact that getting a "typing cadence" with each individual's eyes is probably valuable in and of itself.

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

#169

Post by p1esk »

adamnemecek wrote: post #59

I have a new approach of doing ML, where autodiff is replaced with something better. Magically a lot of things fall into place. This approach should make problems like this relatively straight forward. Interested in hearing more?

Interested in hearing more?

If you can show your new approach works, sure. Usually this is done via papers in ML conferences, but if you have reproducible results on Github I'll take a look.

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

#170

Post by claytongulick »

I did a fun project a few years ago with eye tracking.

We built a prototype for roadside sobriety checks. The idea was to take race/subjectivity out of the equation in these traffic stops.

We modified an oculus quest and added IR LEDs and cameras with small PI zero's. I wrote software for the quest that gave instructions and had a series of examinations where you'd follow a 3D ball, the screen would brighten and darken, and several others while I looked for eye jerks (saccades) and pupil dilation. The officer was able to see your pupil (enlarged) on a laptop in real time and we'd mark suspicious times on the video timeline for review.

It was an interesting combination of video decoding, OpenCV and real-time streams with a pretty slick UI. The Pi Zero was easily capable of handling real-time video stream decoding, OpenCV and Node. Where I ran into performance problems I wrote node -> c++ bindings.

We did it all on something silly like a 50k budget. Neat project.

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