Comment by Componica | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Componica | Hacker News Reader

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.

One of our partners is a renowned neuro-ophthalmologist at our local university, and he's always suggested medical applications for our array. However, the combination of low volume, slim margins, and regulatory challenges (acquiring patient training sets and navigating FDA approval) makes this direction potentially perilous for us. What helps us is our human factors partner has decades long connections with NASA, FAA, and DoD which gets us a foot in the door, and allows us adopt a low volume/high margin strategy. This approach is letting us refine our technology and then we can focus on standardizing it, reducing costs, and perhaps refocus on medical applications.

I do think your suggestion is a good approach, but what's key is finding smart investment that has experience in developing medical devices.

How expensive is your system?

Do you have software that converts internal tracking info into pixel coordinates? Multiple screens?

Luxury car prices per array due to development, customization and the type of clientele. We have a mech engineer onsite to adapt the camera arrays to the environment, such as a cockpit or centrifuge, while taking into account the field of views and mounts. Yes it can handle multiple screens and curves like domes, the fun part is working out the geometry to convert gaze vectors into pixel coordinates. Pixel accuracy is a function of the number of camera (6 to 12), distance to the array, and geometry of the subject and array but we can typically discern which button / control / digit a pilot observed.

Of course cost can be substantially decreased if everything was standardized and the mech engineering was done once. BOMs (excluding the high-end desktop computer) is about $2000-$3000. My dream would be to reduce that cost by moving the computer vision to compute modules per pairs of cameras reducing the BOM to < $1000 and avoiding the desktop.

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