My three partners and I have be developing and selling multi-camera arrays specifically for eye tracking as well as measuring other physiological features for several years now. Our main customers are a couple university research groups, a human factors group in Lockheed, and just recently the US Air Force. In fact we just returned from a trip to Wright-Patterson installing an array in a hypobaric chamber to perform gaze tracker and pupil response for pilots under hypoxic conditions. Phase two will be a custom gaze tracker for their centrifuge. Our main features are accurate eye and face tracking up to a meter from the array, minimal calibration per subject (about 10 seconds staring at a dot), pupil response for measuring fatigue and other things, plus we can adapt the array for the client ranging from a cockpit to a large flat screen TV. We've looked into medical usage such as ALS, but we're bootstrapped based in Iowa and found the military niche as a more direct way to generate cash flow. It's ashame we can't apply this work towards people with medical needs, but we don't have the funds nor the clients to make such a pivot.
Have you thought about settinng up a subsidiary that licenses your base tech for a reasonable royalty fee and raise capital for the subsidiary to develop a medical product from it?
The risk and part of the returns there are for the investors. While it will generate additional revenue (and diversification) for your bootstrapped company allowing you to keep building and mitigate some of the risk of having a narrow (military) client base.
And if it becomes a major success (sounds like pg thinks that's possible) you'll co-own it.
I responded to the thread but Senseye has been working on this for a while now. Originally they were working with the US Air Force to help with improving pilot training - fatigue etc.. inference with retinal reading
They have generally struggled to find funding for their eye tracking focused work, and have recently had to pivot away from the really exciting but hard to fund stuff into PTSD screening (which is important too).
I can connect you with the founder if desired via the email in my bio
I do hardware. I do software. I do computer vision. I built some software that ran on a cellphone used by LEO (law enforcement officers) to determine if the person they are quizzing is inebriated or impaired through controlled substances by examining the person's eyes and having them focus on images displayed on the phone screen. I've done eye tracking using fully custom solutions and also through a few of the off-the-shelf SDKs such as GazeSense from eyeware and a few other SDKs.
The problem is not the eye-tracking, it is reasonably easy to build robust systems that can do that easily enough, even with custom hardware under all sorts of lighting conditions. The hard part is the UX if you are trying to build something that isn't hampered by current UI paradigms.
Rapid typing and menus of custom actions with just eye movement, though fatiguing, shouldn't be hard to solve, and then render the output however you want; text, text to speech, commands issued to an machine, etc. Making a usable user interface to do anything else, that's where the rubber hits the road.
@pg, which software is your friend using? If it is anything like I've looked in to in the past, it's over-priced accessibility crap with a UI straight out of the 1990s.
Yes, UX is the key. The iPhone succeeded because they didn't just take macOS's mouse/keyboard UI and slap it under a touchscreen. They took the limitations and strengths of capacitive touch and designed a bespoke UX with new concepts everywhere.
Input modalities define platforms. Eye tracking is a new input modality and will define a new platform. It needs a whole new UX designed around its limitations and strengths. It needs a keyboard, it needs a browser, it needs copy and paste, it needs an app switcher, it needs a whole vocabulary of standard interactions and best practices. Apple has a good start in Vision Pro but they're not going to be the only ones doing UX for eye tracking. There's definitely room for other players with fresh ideas.
I've got ALS (MND). Completely agree UX is the problem, gazing at a keyboard on a screen designed to stop multiple keys clogging (QWERTY) feels wrong.
Some ideas
- gesture based eye movements, maybe two sweeps on a nine by nine grid, which map directly to phonemes
- enormous 4k 75inch tv with thousands of words or ideograms or phrases
- "writing" with your eyes then doing line to text AI to clean up
- standardish keyboard with massive LLM prediction and clean UX for autocomplete/throwaway with branching options
Ideas are cheap so no clue if these work. Also Tobi split between cheap good non-hackable gaming eyetracking and medical products doesn't help. Finally, with ALS you want to communicate about different things and are more tired.
> I built some software that ran on a cellphone used by LEO (law enforcement officers) to determine if the person they are quizzing is inebriated or impaired through controlled substances by examining the person's eyes and having them focus on images displayed on the phone screen.
Is this used in the field, and what level of testing and validation was required?
This is coming from a skeptical POV, but I’m genuinely curious to hear about the process. Historically, of course, law enforcement technology has a history of being anything but evidence based. It’s good that there’s finally progress away from pseudoscience like fiber analysis and smoke patterns.
But from your experience is there anything to stop LEOs from adopting new tools and technologies without adequate evaluation and standards, aside from the courts, which have such a poor track record in this space?
EEG recording is an alternative that would outlast the potential disease-related degradation of eye movements. Manny Donchin gave a brown bag at UIUC about the possibilities of using this approach to support communication by ALS patients many years ago. It's clever: they use the P300 marker to index attention/intention. I do not recall whether he and his colleagues ever commercialized the tech. I believe that this publication is representative: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinph.2005.06.027
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 recordings. This is a physical limit due to attenuation of brain’s electrical fields outside of the skull, which is hard to overcome. For example, all commercial “mind-reading” toys are actually working based off head and eye muscle signals.
Implanted electrodes provide better signal but are many iterations away from becoming viable commercially. Signal degrades over months as the brain builds scar tissue around electrodes and the brain surgery is obviously pretty dangerous. Iteration cycles are very slow because of the need for government approval for testing in humans (for a good reason).
If I wanted to help a paralyzed friend, who could only move his/her eyes, I would definitely focus on the eye-tracking tech. It hands-down beat all BCIs I’ve heard of.
This! Eye tracking is slow and not good - but does that just mean we need to “faster horse” it or is there another option for bridging the communication gap for people with ALS and similar diseases? I have to believe there are better answers with other tech - likely EEG (+ AI).
My family is one of the unlucky ones that has genes for ALS so I’ve watched enough family members struggle. (I’m lucky, selfishly, because I dodged the gene but I still care deeply about this).
I had this thought, but then I thought about if my friend was struggling with a problem had had practical but imperfect solutions, would I better serve them by funding highly feasible solutions that they're already familiar with, or experimental moonshots that are more likely to fail, will take longer to implement, and my friend may not even care for at all...
I worked on eye tracking hardware for Microsoft HoloLens. Several AR headsets offer decent eye tracking, including Hololens 2 and Magic Leap's ML2. I think Tobii's eye tracking glasses are probably better as a stand-alone solution though: https://www.tobii.com/products/eye-trackers/wearables/tobii-...
Agreed, the eye tracking itself is really a mostly-solved problem (Tobii are indeed leaders in the area). It's how it's used that matters - and as mentioned above, it's likely that it's the usability/interface that needs work.
PS VR2 uses Tobii's tech to do eye tracking, it is mostly being used for foveated rendering but some games also use it for gameplay, one for example allows you to shoot at enemies with your gaze.
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.
I believe you may be mixing up Paul Graham and Sam Altman. Easy to do because they both ran YC at different times, but WorldCoin is from Sam Altman and this tweet is from PG.
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.
I've been working on the menuing side [1] based on crossing Fitt's Law with Huffman trees. But, don't know the constraints for ALS.
Hopefully, whomever takes this on doesn't take the standard Accessibility approach, which is adding an extra layer of complexity on an existing UI.
A good friend, Gordon Fuller, found out he was going blind. So, he co-founded one of the first VR startups in the 90's. Why? For wayfinding.
What we came up with is a concept of Universal design. Start over from first principles. Seeing Gordon use an Accessible UI is painful to watch, it takes three times as many steps to navigate and confirm. So, what is the factor? 0.3 X?
Imagine if we could refactor all apps with a LLM, and then couple it with an auto compete menu. Within that menu is personal history of all your past transversals.
What would be the result? A 10X? Would my sister in a wheelchair be able to use it? Would love to find out!
Another route might also be sub-vocalization[1], like TTS for your thoughts. I recently picked up some cheap toys to get started trying to emulate the results[2].
I agree! My PhD thesis is on this topic [1]. We’ve also done a very limited pilot test on a patient with ALS, with above random chance. Actual results may vary heavily on individual disease progression—the more motor recruitment that’s intact, the better.
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.
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.
> A friend of mine has ALS and can only move his eyes. He has an eye-controlled keyboard, but it's not very good. Can you make him a better one?
When I worked for one of the big game engines I got contacted by the makers of the tech that Stephen Hawking used to communicate, which includes an eye tracker:
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, and then get crushed by the financial realities. Just from the comments, you can see how many startups went either the military route or got acquired into VR programs.
The worst I've seen, btw, is trying to build a better powered wheelchair. All the tech is out there to make powered wheelchairs less bulky and more functional, but the costs of getting it approved for health insurance to pay the price, combined with any possible risk of them falling over, combined with the tiny market you are addressing makes it nearly impossible to develop and ship an improvement. I do hope that we reach a tipping point in the near future where a new wheelchair makes sense to build, because something more nimble would be a big improvement to people's lives.
ALS is a configuration. Blindness is a configuration. Conventional UIs are built for a different configuration. Accesible UI usually overloads the conventional. If you start from scatch, sometimes you find something new. If you're lucky, the new thing scales to other configurations.
For example, I wrote a NLP parser for a calendar app, at Tempo.AI. It was much more efficient than the visual interface. And thus, it was accessible. But, it didn't use the accessible idiom. Instead, it was universally more efficient, whether you are blind or not.
A good example is a wheelchair accessible doorway. One method is to have a button at wheelchair height. The other method is to have the door open with an electronic eye. The first is Accessible. The second is Universal. Doesn't matter if you are in a wheelchair or not. It's a throughput multiplier.
Another use case that I've seen talked about when it comes to eye-tracking technology is as it relates to the ad industry (it's always the freakin ad industry...). Eye-tracking is another way to detect what you're paying attention to. Currently, a lot of the ad business depends on measuring impressions, but they do so with heuristics. Eye-tracking can actually tell you if a user is looking at something vs pretending they do.
Before hearing the business case, it would be good to know what is already available and has been found wanting. There seem to be a lot of people saying that they have working systems of some kind.
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.
As someone who suffered some severe mobility impairment a few years ago and relied extensively on eye tracking for just over a year, https://precisiongazemouse.org/ (Windows) and https://talonvoice.com/ (multiplatform) are great. In my experience the hardware is already surprisingly good, in that you get accuracy to within an inch or half an inch depending on your training. Rather, it's all about the UX wrapped around it, as a few other comments have raised.
IMO Talon wins* for that by supporting voice recognition and mouth noises (think lip popping), which are less fatiguing than one-eye blinks for common actions like clicking. The creator is active here sometimes.
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)
Huh. I wrote a paper for my undergraduate dissertation on eye tracking using a laptop camera, and it ended up published and I won a scholarship award (for €150, imagine that). I wonder if it's time to dust off that project
I agree, eye tracking is going to have really broad applications. I've been interested in eye tracking for over a decade, and in fact built my own eye tracker, joined a startup, and got acquired by Google[1]. But there's way more to do. We've barely scratched the surface of what's possible with eye tracking and I'd love to take a second crack at it.
Adhawk, adhawk.io, has the only all day ultralight eye tracking wearable I'm aware of, all MEMS based with ultra high scan rates, 500Hz+ and research grade accuracy. For ALS u likely need something light and frictionless, wearing a hot and heavy headset all day probably doesn't work.
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.
Yes, the ALS/disability angle is noble. Viewed another way, the entire human race is afflicted by the disability of not having access to eye-tracking (and other) technologies. Paul Graham and co. are also invested in companies that are going to be highly enabled and boosted by the growth of eye-tracking and related technologies. I don't view his statement of motivation related to ALS as insincere, I just also notice that it's accessible, easily understandable, and also in line with other aspects of Paul's motivation (and that's a good thing).
I would also recommend Jean-Dominique Bauby's Le Scaphandre et le Papillon to anyone interested in this topic. Typing using eye movements was used in that book in a slow, inefficient manner. In the book's case, the question one should ask is, was his UI paced at the exact correct speed? I was and still am deeply emotionally moved by what the author was able to accomplish and convey. I am unsure if a faster keyboard would have made a meaningful and positive difference in that particular case, to the author's quality of life. I'll need to give that book another read with that question in mind.
Happily, I expect eye tracking to find fascinating, novel and unexpected applications. As others have stated, UI/UX design is an interesting part of this puzzle. For example, if you ask an LLM to output short branches of text and have a writer look at the words that he wants to convey. It's definitely blurring the line between reading and writing. Myself, finding writing to be a tactile exercise, I think that emotional state comes into play. That's what I'm interested in. Yes, can you literally read someone's eyes and tell what they are thinking?
I'm consulting with an Australian group called Control Bionics. They have a US company & office, with CTO and sales team in Ohio, but software engineering is done in AU. Their primary product is an electromyography and accelerometer hardware device to detect muscle activations or movements, and then most commonly used as a mouse-click substitute in conjunction with third-party eye-gaze hardware proving the cursor. (I've also designed them an autonomous wheelchair module, but that's another story...)
@pg - If your friend has not tried adding a mouse-click via something they can activate other than eye-gaze, this would be worth a shot. We have a lot of MND patients who use our combination to great success. If they can twitch an eyebrow, wiggle a toe or a finger, or even flex their abdomen, we can put electrodes there and give them a way forward.
Also, my contact details are in my profile. I'd be happy to put you in touch with our CEO and I'm confident that offers of funding would be of interest. The company is listed on the Australian stock exchange, but could likely go much further with a direct injection of capital to bolster the engineering team.
Eye tracking is essentially a model of visual attention. Visual attention is part of the overall attention space and big companies and use-cases are built around visual attention. Today we track attention by explicit interactions, if we can model around implicitly observable interactions - then we have a much larger observable data space around the user.,
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.
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.
PG mention that the solution his friend used wasn't any good. How does the best system there is out today work? And what different solutions are there?
How about a library that starts loading a link when you look at it with intent. Or maybe with BCI integration that detects the moment you decide you want to access it.
Or how about a UI that automatically adapts to your eye movement and access patterns to minimize the amount of eye movement required to complete your most common tasks by rearranging the UI elements.
I thought this was solved long time ago, I wrote a program many years ago using kinect that tracks the center of the eye pretty precisely, using color gradients. The pupil is pretty uniform in every human being (it's black) surrounded by some color and then white. Even just a few pixels are enough to do it.
That's an interesting idea. How do you see it being beneficial to machine learning models, other than (I assume) it could work more efficiently within less foveal regions? Perhaps cases where you want the vision to emulate human vision?
I would like to look at the problem more deeply, the eyes can be tracked but what about facial movement, the more data the better training for machine learning
I believe Paul Graham can Google or use AI and already knows about the companies and links you posted. His post was a call to action to connect with people working on yet to be discovered innovations and inspire those and others quietly working to come forward and connect with him.
Aw, that's nice of pg to want something better for his friend. As cynical as we are about technology, new developments can be so fantastic for accessibility and better quality of life.
And if that were where the story ended we'd have an honest feel-good going. New developments -could- be fantastic for accessibility and QoL, but without exception they just end up getting sucked into a marketing surveillance suite.
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.
Im something of a conspiracy theorist myself, but this is irrational and unwarranted: if they wanted to research something strategic, they could easily summon the brain power (see OpenAI and the creation of near-general intelligence, and then ask where Facebooks $40B on metaverse smokescreen went to.)
PG is a good guy - he sides with entrepreneurs, and created an industry-wide standard for a founder friendly seed stage investment deal (called a SAFE) in a world of hugely predatory deal makers. And from his twitter its pretty clear that he's biased towards fairness and humanity in general.
Read some of PG's essays. People dont share deep insights and knowledge like that for free if they are made of the wrong stuff.
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.
Is anyone speedrunning this? I can't find anything with a quick look.
I'd consider an approach like the human powered helicopter parable.
I'd create a model for the eyes / face. So a screen like a phone is put in front of a camera with a model face and controllable eyes that you use software to control. Maybe skip the screen in front of a camera and link straight into the video feed.
It knows the limits of the eyes (different models for different people and situations) can measure fatigue etc.
A lot of past chronic diseases have had cures found. Leprosy and tuberculosis for example. ALS is a tricky one though, not well understood and quite likely prion like.
Someone should do this, but for the love of god, DO NOT take any venture capital to do it. No matter how well-intentioned the VCs are at the start, eventually your eye tracking startup will 100% be used for advertising as investors in your Series D need to make an exit or take you public.
As we are talking about a company to help people with medical problems.
Second Sight was giving patients artificial eyes. When they ran out of funding, they closed shop. The patients lost support system for their eyes. If anything goes wrong with their artificial eye, there is no one to repair or fix it. They just have to carry a piece of useless metal junk in their head.
Except Apple has stated they will encrypt that information and not supply it to apps to avoid targeting or fingerprinting. And second how would that help someone with ALS?
Not really a huge PG fan, but this is what billionaires should be doing: see where a need is exists and put some of your insane wealth towards making an improvement. This why I respect Elon even though I don’t really like him; he puts his money to use, in a very public manner.
I'm not arguing that Elon doesn't put his money to use publicly, but I'm interested how you think he does. Do you mean he uses his wealth privately in a way that benefits the public, and/or he does it in public view?
YC was investing in ways the traditional VCs weren’t when it started, and coding HN was a part of it. I doubt I’m the only one who had having a few HN tech support emails from PG.
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.
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.
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.
Componica|2 years ago
t0mas88|2 years ago
The risk and part of the returns there are for the investors. While it will generate additional revenue (and diversification) for your bootstrapped company allowing you to keep building and mitigate some of the risk of having a narrow (military) client base.
And if it becomes a major success (sounds like pg thinks that's possible) you'll co-own it.
lostmsu|2 years ago
Do you have software that converts internal tracking info into pixel coordinates? Multiple screens?
AndrewKemendo|2 years ago
https://senseye.co/
They have generally struggled to find funding for their eye tracking focused work, and have recently had to pivot away from the really exciting but hard to fund stuff into PTSD screening (which is important too).
I can connect you with the founder if desired via the email in my bio
justinlloyd|2 years ago
The problem is not the eye-tracking, it is reasonably easy to build robust systems that can do that easily enough, even with custom hardware under all sorts of lighting conditions. The hard part is the UX if you are trying to build something that isn't hampered by current UI paradigms.
Rapid typing and menus of custom actions with just eye movement, though fatiguing, shouldn't be hard to solve, and then render the output however you want; text, text to speech, commands issued to an machine, etc. Making a usable user interface to do anything else, that's where the rubber hits the road.
@pg, which software is your friend using? If it is anything like I've looked in to in the past, it's over-priced accessibility crap with a UI straight out of the 1990s.
modeless|2 years ago
Input modalities define platforms. Eye tracking is a new input modality and will define a new platform. It needs a whole new UX designed around its limitations and strengths. It needs a keyboard, it needs a browser, it needs copy and paste, it needs an app switcher, it needs a whole vocabulary of standard interactions and best practices. Apple has a good start in Vision Pro but they're not going to be the only ones doing UX for eye tracking. There's definitely room for other players with fresh ideas.
jimduk|2 years ago
- gesture based eye movements, maybe two sweeps on a nine by nine grid, which map directly to phonemes
- enormous 4k 75inch tv with thousands of words or ideograms or phrases
- "writing" with your eyes then doing line to text AI to clean up
- standardish keyboard with massive LLM prediction and clean UX for autocomplete/throwaway with branching options
Ideas are cheap so no clue if these work. Also Tobi split between cheap good non-hackable gaming eyetracking and medical products doesn't help. Finally, with ALS you want to communicate about different things and are more tired.
skue|2 years ago
Is this used in the field, and what level of testing and validation was required?
This is coming from a skeptical POV, but I’m genuinely curious to hear about the process. Historically, of course, law enforcement technology has a history of being anything but evidence based. It’s good that there’s finally progress away from pseudoscience like fiber analysis and smoke patterns.
But from your experience is there anything to stop LEOs from adopting new tools and technologies without adequate evaluation and standards, aside from the courts, which have such a poor track record in this space?
dewarrn1|2 years ago
mikpanko|2 years ago
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 recordings. This is a physical limit due to attenuation of brain’s electrical fields outside of the skull, which is hard to overcome. For example, all commercial “mind-reading” toys are actually working based off head and eye muscle signals.
Implanted electrodes provide better signal but are many iterations away from becoming viable commercially. Signal degrades over months as the brain builds scar tissue around electrodes and the brain surgery is obviously pretty dangerous. Iteration cycles are very slow because of the need for government approval for testing in humans (for a good reason).
If I wanted to help a paralyzed friend, who could only move his/her eyes, I would definitely focus on the eye-tracking tech. It hands-down beat all BCIs I’ve heard of.
incongruity|2 years ago
My family is one of the unlucky ones that has genes for ALS so I’ve watched enough family members struggle. (I’m lucky, selfishly, because I dodged the gene but I still care deeply about this).
BoorishBears|2 years ago
blackguardx|2 years ago
zh3|2 years ago
ErneX|2 years ago
DoingIsLearning|2 years ago
Seems like all the solutions out there are some flavour or variation of this.
tootie|2 years ago
lostmsu|2 years ago
sam_goody|2 years ago
Either:
Saying, on behalf of a friend, that he doesn't believe PG.tikkun|2 years ago
losvedir|2 years ago
kunalgupta|2 years ago
MasterYoda|2 years ago
musesum|2 years ago
Hopefully, whomever takes this on doesn't take the standard Accessibility approach, which is adding an extra layer of complexity on an existing UI.
A good friend, Gordon Fuller, found out he was going blind. So, he co-founded one of the first VR startups in the 90's. Why? For wayfinding.
What we came up with is a concept of Universal design. Start over from first principles. Seeing Gordon use an Accessible UI is painful to watch, it takes three times as many steps to navigate and confirm. So, what is the factor? 0.3 X?
Imagine if we could refactor all apps with a LLM, and then couple it with an auto compete menu. Within that menu is personal history of all your past transversals.
What would be the result? A 10X? Would my sister in a wheelchair be able to use it? Would love to find out!
[1] https://github.com/musesum/DeepMenu
kubi07|2 years ago
He is using tobii eye tracker. There is a video he made about the eye tracker. It's in Turkish but you can see how he uses it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzSXyiWN_uw
Here is a article about him in English: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/twitch-streamer-with-a...
fartjetpack|2 years ago
1. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2004/subvoca...
2. https://github.com/kitschpatrol/Brain
tbenst|2 years ago
[1] https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/research/funded-research/s...
qup|2 years ago
fastball|2 years ago
pg|2 years ago
KaiserPro|2 years ago
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.
omeze|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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readyplayernull|2 years ago
When I worked for one of the big game engines I got contacted by the makers of the tech that Stephen Hawking used to communicate, which includes an eye tracker:
https://www.businessinsider.com/an-eye-tracking-interface-he...
lostdog|2 years ago
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, and then get crushed by the financial realities. Just from the comments, you can see how many startups went either the military route or got acquired into VR programs.
The worst I've seen, btw, is trying to build a better powered wheelchair. All the tech is out there to make powered wheelchairs less bulky and more functional, but the costs of getting it approved for health insurance to pay the price, combined with any possible risk of them falling over, combined with the tiny market you are addressing makes it nearly impossible to develop and ship an improvement. I do hope that we reach a tipping point in the near future where a new wheelchair makes sense to build, because something more nimble would be a big improvement to people's lives.
musesum|2 years ago
For example, I wrote a NLP parser for a calendar app, at Tempo.AI. It was much more efficient than the visual interface. And thus, it was accessible. But, it didn't use the accessible idiom. Instead, it was universally more efficient, whether you are blind or not.
A good example is a wheelchair accessible doorway. One method is to have a button at wheelchair height. The other method is to have the door open with an electronic eye. The first is Accessible. The second is Universal. Doesn't matter if you are in a wheelchair or not. It's a throughput multiplier.
enumjorge|2 years ago
anymouse123456|2 years ago
mhb|2 years ago
TheHappyOddish|2 years ago
drexlspivey|2 years ago
sokoloff|2 years ago
caspar|2 years ago
IMO Talon wins* for that by supporting voice recognition and mouth noises (think lip popping), which are less fatiguing than one-eye blinks for common actions like clicking. The creator is active here sometimes.
(* An alternative is to roll your own sort of thing with https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly and other tools as I did, but it's a lot more effort)
splatcollision|2 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeWriter
https://github.com/eyewriter/eyewriter
https://www.instructables.com/The-EyeWriter-20/
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/145518
arketyp|2 years ago
tpmx|2 years ago
(/s)
bacon_waffle|2 years ago
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)
jwm1|2 years ago
Avshalom|2 years ago
https://dasher.acecentre.net/
maccard|2 years ago
Firmwarrior|2 years ago
gwurldz|2 years ago
https://thinksmartbox.com/products/eye-gaze/
I once interviewed at this company. Unfortunately didn't get the job but very impressed nonetheless.
ankaAr|2 years ago
Verath|2 years ago
The solution actually works pretty well, especially when calibrated to a single individual.
modeless|2 years ago
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/24/google-buys-eyefluence-eye...
mlajtos|2 years ago
> But there's way more to do. We've barely scratched the surface of what's possible with eye tracking and I'd love to take a second crack at it.
What do you have in mind? What would you like to see?
krsrhe|2 years ago
sprocket|2 years ago
At the time, the other options were much more expensive (> $10-15k) which were sadly out of out budget.
sailplease|2 years ago
yyyk|2 years ago
DoingIsLearning|2 years ago
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.
acyou|2 years ago
I would also recommend Jean-Dominique Bauby's Le Scaphandre et le Papillon to anyone interested in this topic. Typing using eye movements was used in that book in a slow, inefficient manner. In the book's case, the question one should ask is, was his UI paced at the exact correct speed? I was and still am deeply emotionally moved by what the author was able to accomplish and convey. I am unsure if a faster keyboard would have made a meaningful and positive difference in that particular case, to the author's quality of life. I'll need to give that book another read with that question in mind.
Happily, I expect eye tracking to find fascinating, novel and unexpected applications. As others have stated, UI/UX design is an interesting part of this puzzle. For example, if you ask an LLM to output short branches of text and have a writer look at the words that he wants to convey. It's definitely blurring the line between reading and writing. Myself, finding writing to be a tactile exercise, I think that emotional state comes into play. That's what I'm interested in. Yes, can you literally read someone's eyes and tell what they are thinking?
ZeroCool2u|2 years ago
zefzefzef|2 years ago
For inspiration, check out the Vocal Eyes Becker Communication System: https://jasonbecker.com/archive/eye_communication.html
A system invented for ALS patient Jason Becker by his dad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGFDWTC8B8g
Also already mentioned in here, EyeWriter ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeWriter ) and Dasher ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software) ) are two interesting projects to look into.
anupamchugh|2 years ago
Schwolop|2 years ago
@pg - If your friend has not tried adding a mouse-click via something they can activate other than eye-gaze, this would be worth a shot. We have a lot of MND patients who use our combination to great success. If they can twitch an eyebrow, wiggle a toe or a finger, or even flex their abdomen, we can put electrodes there and give them a way forward.
Also, my contact details are in my profile. I'd be happy to put you in touch with our CEO and I'm confident that offers of funding would be of interest. The company is listed on the Australian stock exchange, but could likely go much further with a direct injection of capital to bolster the engineering team.
Cheers, Tom
mhb|2 years ago
mercurialsolo|2 years ago
mcbutterbunz|2 years ago
claytongulick|2 years ago
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.
archo|2 years ago
dimask|2 years ago
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.
MasterYoda|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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imranq|2 years ago
I'm guessing a combination of projection mapping, built in lighting, and some crowdsourced data will get accuracy to very usable levels
user3939382|2 years ago
Or how about a UI that automatically adapts to your eye movement and access patterns to minimize the amount of eye movement required to complete your most common tasks by rearranging the UI elements.
ricardobayes|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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PBnFlash|2 years ago
steve_adams_86|2 years ago
quietthrow|2 years ago
KaiserPro|2 years ago
TheGuyWhoCodes|2 years ago
mrwnmonm|2 years ago
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peter_retief|2 years ago
amelius|2 years ago
tmalsburg2|2 years ago
jfrbfbreudh|2 years ago
DoingIsLearning|2 years ago
Seems like all the solutions out there are some flavour or variation of this.
6stringmerc|2 years ago
joshm93|2 years ago
It would be great to hear from paul about how his friend uses the keyboard and what kind of tasks he’d love to do but can’t with current solutions.
It seems like a throughput problem to me. How can you type quickly using only your eyes?
Have people explored using small phonetic alphabets or Morse code style encoding?
Once I got tensorflow working, I’d start mapping different kinds of ux. Throughput is king.
jjbcb|2 years ago
frakkingcylons|2 years ago
kken|2 years ago
Both apple and Facebook acquired eye tracking companies to kickstart their own development.
Here are some Top-lists
https://imotions.com/blog/insights/trend/top-eye-tracking-ha... https://valentinazezelj.medium.com/top-10-eye-tracking-compa...
Its also an active research field, this is one of the bigger conferences: https://etra.acm.org/2023/
TootsMagoon|2 years ago
I believe Paul Graham can Google or use AI and already knows about the companies and links you posted. His post was a call to action to connect with people working on yet to be discovered innovations and inspire those and others quietly working to come forward and connect with him.
quickthrower2|2 years ago
jacquesm|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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hardwaregeek|2 years ago
forgetfreeman|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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frenchman99|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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rsync|2 years ago
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 we'd do for ALS, right ?
supremearkitect|2 years ago
PG is a good guy - he sides with entrepreneurs, and created an industry-wide standard for a founder friendly seed stage investment deal (called a SAFE) in a world of hugely predatory deal makers. And from his twitter its pretty clear that he's biased towards fairness and humanity in general.
Read some of PG's essays. People dont share deep insights and knowledge like that for free if they are made of the wrong stuff.
dimask|2 years ago
pmichaud|2 years ago
bingemaker|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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aaron695|2 years ago
It'd be good to know what rate we need to beat and some other metrics.
aaron695|2 years ago
I'd consider an approach like the human powered helicopter parable.
I'd create a model for the eyes / face. So a screen like a phone is put in front of a camera with a model face and controllable eyes that you use software to control. Maybe skip the screen in front of a camera and link straight into the video feed.
It knows the limits of the eyes (different models for different people and situations) can measure fatigue etc.
You could run billions of simulations....
atleastoptimal|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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dennis_jeeves1|2 years ago
As far I know, I don't don't think mainstream medicine is close to solving _any_ chronic condition, except managing it.
tim333|2 years ago
turnsout|2 years ago
abdullahkhalids|2 years ago
Second Sight was giving patients artificial eyes. When they ran out of funding, they closed shop. The patients lost support system for their eyes. If anything goes wrong with their artificial eye, there is no one to repair or fix it. They just have to carry a piece of useless metal junk in their head.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
methou|2 years ago
shakna|2 years ago
jacquesm|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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fit2rule|2 years ago
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soligern|2 years ago
post_break|2 years ago
woodruffw|2 years ago
morkalork|2 years ago
Whilst it plays an unskippable and unblockable ad (thanks weiapi!)
jacquesm|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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foreverobama|2 years ago
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joos3|2 years ago
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FlamingMoe|2 years ago
turnsout|2 years ago
steve_adams_86|2 years ago
j45|2 years ago
YC was investing in ways the traditional VCs weren’t when it started, and coding HN was a part of it. I doubt I’m the only one who had having a few HN tech support emails from PG.
borg16|2 years ago
can you elaborate?
unknown|2 years ago
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cratermoon|2 years ago
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supremearkitect|2 years ago
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sillysaurusx|2 years ago
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.
adamnemecek|2 years ago
Interested in hearing more?
p1esk|2 years ago
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.