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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

Gaze tracking. I've used the dedicated gaze tracking sensors from Tobii and it's really natural and responsive. I think we're going to see a lot of touchless interaction become popular in the post-covid world.

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I agree. While there are natural limits to how precise the eye is for interactions (eyes naturally flicker back and forth) I definitely also feel like there's potential here. I did a university project on combining voice and gaze tracking for programming - and while gaze is good for e.g. selecting a region of the screen, it's hard to click small things with it.

How accurate are those sensors? I've often thought how nice it would be to get rid of the mouse and use sensors to figure out where exactly on my screen I'm looking.

Mouse-level accuracy requires a well-calibrated setup and the correct size monitor and sitting posture. If you want to do something like a Square POS checkout and need to distinguish a random visitor looking at 4 buttons, it would be pretty forgiving.

Thank you, so not yet an option for me; I doubt my posture and sitting position is regular enough that calibration would work for me.

Might, at some point, be a welcome addition to a touch pad though. If you touch the pad and your pointer is far away to where you're looking, jump to the area and do the fine tuning with the fingers.

I already do that without the need of a touch pad, just use your numpad keys as a mouse if you're on windows look into mouse.ahk. Tobii will snap mouse to where you're looking at and senses mouse is moving. Works great when you want to stay on home row, selecting text with it though, not as good.

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