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Comment by antileet | Hacker News Reader

It was an interesting proof of concept. I'm not sure how much the parallax-correction or full-screen toggling would help but there seem to be many more possibilities. This is a great opportunity for Canonical or other developers to build in a gesture-recognition framework which other developers can plug into and build applications.

Think about it - a gesture can mute the sound, so you don't need to pause the music when a phone call comes in. Get up and leave, and the screen will lock itself. Stick out your tongue and it'll check your email. Heck, I'm sure soon enough Ubuntu will detect your face seeming sad during debugging sessions and automatically shows kitten pictures (Emacs probably does this already, I'm not sure).

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Yes, this way of interacting with your pc could be a nice addition to existing ways like touch or voice recognition, particularly if this is part of a system wide framework. Locking your screen when you are not in front of it (and eventually logging you back on as soon as your face is detected) could be a not too invasive first step in this direction.

Instead of me waving my hands to mute the sound I'd prefer the microphone to pick up my ringtone and mute itself. From a technical point of view, this all is possible for a couple of years now, no? So what's the reason why this wasn't implemented earlier? Maybe people find running a webcam all the time too invasive or the concepts too unintuitive?

Remember when voice recognition was all the rage? I remember when I was younger and some kid on the block got a copy of some voice recognition software. Plus, he was the only one with a computer with horsepower to run it. Anyways, we all sat down and tried to train it - given the fact that we were in India and our accent isn't very easily understandable by most humans, let alone computers - we did see some results.

That kid would have the time of his life saying "Open solitaire" loudly and clearly into the microphone a gazillion times, and the system would interpret it as "delete my homework" or "email grandma all my private files".

All this seems pretty neat, but when it comes to just getting a little work done - I'm still skeptical about how much advantage touch, motion, gestures, speech, etc will help.

I am very excited about gaze tracking though. I don't think it's too long before I can switch from one window to another by just looking at it and twitching my eye.

> All this seems pretty neat, but when it comes to just getting a little work done - I'm still skeptical about how much advantage touch, motion, gestures, speech, etc will help.

Probably major advantages for people with physical disabilities and repetitive strain injuries.

> I don't think it's too long before I can switch from one window to another by just looking at it and twitching my eye.

Most X11 window managers support the option for Focus Follows Mouse, where simply hovering over a different window will make it the active window, and after a short delay, bring it to the front of the window stack if necessary. Just combine this with "Multi Pointer X" and a gaze tracking camera that acts as another mouse input, and you could have what you're looking for...

I'm pretty sure I would want things to happen more or less only when I take some action with my hands (gaze AND click/keypress). Things opening, closing, raising, lowering, or otherwise flying around purely on the basis of my gaze would probably be disorienting, or there would be a lot of false positives. ("I don't WANT that window to raise!")

Windows don't raise unless clicked. They only take keyboard focus when hovered. Of course, desktop environments like Gnome and KDE don't do this anymore by default, to accommodate the converts from Windows and MacOS.

Edit: the focus-stealing prevention already built into window managers could be combined with the gaze tracking to allow you to type into one window while reading from another.

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