Tobii shows off eye-controlled Lenovo laptop

By Molly McHugh March 1, 2011

Image used with permission by copyright holder

And you thought Kinect was mind-blowing. Swedish company Tobii Technology is showing off a laptop at the CeBIT conference in Germany that is controlled by nothing more than your eyeballs. The laptop uses two infrared lights and an extremely sophisticated optical sensor as well as algorithms to determine precisely where on a screen users are looking – and it works for those wearing glasses, too. The technology will allow you to scroll through a website, play a game, and select applications. Users can also vary the brightness of the display and switch between different windows.

The demo was shown on a Lenovo laptop running Windows, two big names in the PC world. But don’t let popular brands get you too excited about owning such software: According to execs with Tobii, the consumer market isn’t a current priority. “The consumer market is still in the future, but it’s something we’re looking into,” Hyléen told the Wall Street Journal. Tobii and Lenovo both could not stress enough that the device is strictly a prototype, and that any sort of mass production is roughly two years away. And for the moment, Tobii is content with this patented technology being used for research, including testing young children for autism.

Still, by all accounts pouring out from CeBIT, the system works remarkably well and is incredibly accurate. Unlike Kinect, which uses a motion-sensing camera, Tobii’s program works by using a bar at the bottom of the computer screen that reads eye movement. For the moment, this makes the computer about twice as thick as your average laptop, and slimming down the hardware is just one of the adjustments to be made before it reaches consumers.

Two years seems like a cruel wait for this type of technology. We thought Kinect was the closest a gamer could get to using The Force, but this could certainly give it some competition. Motion-sensor technology and gaming are a natural fit, and we can only imagine the innovation the can come out of this software.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Before coming to Digital Trends, Molly worked as a freelance writer, occasional photographer, and general technical lackey…

Deals

Lenovo Yoga laptops are $400 off during this Best Buy back-to-school sale

The Lenovo Yoga 91 laptop with the screen showing a scene with lasers.

In their preparations for the upcoming academic year, some students may be looking at laptop deals in search of a powerful machine that will provide immense help for schoolwork. If you're one of them, or if you're giving your children a hand with it, you might want to start by checking out Best Buy laptop deals. One of the retailer's offers is for the Lenovo Yoga 9i, a powerful laptop that's on sale for $400 off, bringing its price down to $1,350 from its original price of $1,750.

The Lenovo Yoga 9i is powered by the 11th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, Intel Iris Xe graphics, and 16GB of RAM, which makes it capable of running the latest productivity apps with ease, as well as multitasking between several apps without any slowdowns and crashes -- a characteristic found in Digital Trends' best laptops. It also comes with a 14-inch touchscreen with 3840 x 2160 resolution, which you can supplement with desktop monitor deals for instances when you need a bigger display, in addition to a 512 GB SSD for storage.

Deals

Amazon drops huge discounts up to 60% off on Lenovo IdeaPad laptops

delivery by christmas gifts instant pot vizio samsung lenovo ideapad 330

With a new school year just around the corner, it is important for every college student who is going back to campus to equip themselves with the right tech for their studies. For the budget-conscious who are looking for less expensive but still the best laptops you can get for your buck, Amazon has you covered. Amazon just dropped the prices of Lenovo IdeaPad 15.6-Inches laptops by up to 60% off. It's not the latest IdeaPad laptop (S940) but it holds up with other name-brand laptops.

We've gathered some of the most discounted laptop deals in different price ranges for you to pick. It's never too early to shop back-to-school laptop deals and you can expect more as Labor Day sales approach. Check them out below and get yours as quick as you can while stocks still last.
LENOVO IDEAPAD 330-15IGM INTEL QUAD CORE CELERON, 4GB RAM, 500 GB HDD
- $254 (21% OFF)

Computing

How to create a bibliography in Word on Windows and Mac

A family using the computer to browse Fios internet together.

A bibliography is an important part of any well-structured college essay, dissertation, article, or other researched writing sample. It lets your readers know what sources you used as building blocks for your work, and isn’t too difficult to make without a template tool. Still, if you’d like to skip a few steps, there’s a terrific bibliography generator built right into Microsoft Word.