Hacker News Reader

Comment by Meph504 | Hacker News Reader

The listed use cases here struck me as odd, I can't imagine why I or anyone wanting to read a news article would allow the site access to my webcam. Nor do I think most users would turn on their cameras to help with any given sites analytics.

So aside from games, what is the actual use case here ?

View on HN

Nielson Research in years past would ask volunteers to attach special equipment to their televisions to report back what they were watching, and for how long. Even nowadays, I have a relative that carries an always-listening device to track ambient music being played/heard.

A technology like this would make it easier to run a program with a subset of volunteers online, w/o them needing any special equipment.

Of course, given that slightly more people (than tech communities) are aware of the dangers of an uncovered camera, the possibility of using this broadly w/o consent is nearly nil.

Well, if I were a company designing an information service, perhaps monetized by ads, then it could make sense to collect eyetracking data to see what people tend to look at, perhaps as part of an AB testing regime.

Then the choice comes between: do I want to bring people in to my expensive lab where I can get high-fidelity results, or do I want to potentially get a much larger sample for cheaper at the cost of lower fidelity.

I'm starting to develop RSI in my wrists and hands, and have been looking at eye tracking systems as a potential way to help reduce the amount of clicking that I need to do.

I was thinking maybe I could put webgazer.js into a chrome extension and use it to navigate through pages for me, but I don't think it has a click mechanism.

fwiw - I'm a huge vimium extension user as keyboarding is less of a strain than mouse movement.

Have you looked at https://eviacam.crea-si.com/ ? Supports Windows, GNU/Linux, and Android, works globally, and runs separately from the browser. (Technically not eye tracking, but close enough)

Wow! I had not, but that looks like it might do the trick. Thanks!

Check out Talon Voice. It's way better than these solutions.

quite a few folks in the voice programing community supplement voice commands with eye tracking using dedicated hardware. Talon [1] is considered an excellent resource in that field and there are also people in the Caster/dragonfly[2] ecosystem using EyeXMouse [3] and wolfmanstout [4] also has some work worth checking out.

[1] https://talonvoice.com/

[2] https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/Caster

[2] https://github.com/Versatilus/EyeXMouse

[4] https://handsfreecoding.org/2014/11/16/getting-started-with-...

Great question. There's a use for usability testing, where paid participants currently sit at an application in a lab to do eye tracking. So there can be a similar version online for if let's say, Bloomberg is testing a new version of their online terminal. Multiple large companies exist that solely develop eye trackers, so there's quite a market for this.

Plus it does not have to be monetary compensation. I could imagine eye tracking as an option to get around the current newspaper paywalls. If you want to read an article, you can choose to pay (subscription) as usual, or you can read them for free if you let the New York Times see what articles you read, for how long, in which order, or what ads you looked it.

I suppose that might be an option, but in my experience people are highly unlikely to grant a site permission to their camera if they aren't using it as part of a conference call.

But I do agree if you have some A/B testing, that the users are doing it as a part of a study, it might be usable.

I would absolutely love to see something like this combined with a live video filter to make actual eye contact during video chat possible.

Facetime calls (probably only from an iphone 10+) do this now https://9to5mac.com/2019/07/03/facetime-eye-contact-correcti...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com