Researchers from Dartmouth College have created a pair of battery-free smart glasses that track your eye movement to create more accurate graphic rendering and augmented reality.
The solar-powered glasses include a microcontroller and a light sensing unit that uses near-infrared lights and photodiodes to see how your eye reflects light. The glasses infer pupil size and position to track rapid rapid eye movements.
Improvements are twofold, as the wearable could not only improve augmented reality, but it also ditches the clunky power supply. However, the prototype is certainly due a little more aesthetic work — but function before fit and form.
The study was only conducted indoors because infrared light outdoors would saturate the light sensors in the current prototype. The researchers plan to tackle outdoor functionality problems with the second generation prototype, as well as continue to improve rapid eye movement detection.
The glasses are designed with the gaming industry in mind, but as the team improves eye tracking, the glasses could one day be used to identify health problems, like mental disorders, fatigue and even assess clinical treatment effectiveness.
