LAS VEGAS — We had the mouse. Then we had the trackpad. Then we had the touchscreen. And now we’ve got the eye. OK, we always had the eye, but a company named Tobii has figured out a way to use your eyes as the navigation tool on computers.
Here at CES 2013 the company announced the Rex, a computer accessory about the length of a straw that attaches to any computer display. It then brings eye-tracking to that computer, allowing you to open a document by just looking at it or scroll down the page just by looking down. It’s pretty amazing stuff. After a short calibration process, look at a slide in a PowerPoint, press the spacebar as you are looking at it and it opens. Look at a location on Google Maps, use your mouse to zoom and it will zoom right in on that location — not somewhere to the east or west, which happens more often than not.
Tobii’s technology is groundbreaking, but not new. The company has been showing this functionality off for a while. In fact, ABC News took at look at the company last year at this very time.
But this time around the company has the Rex, the add-on it is selling to software developers so they can start to build software that works with the hardware. The Rex will cost $995, but Tobii says it will be available for consumers for a more digestible price before the end of the year. Then the goal for the company is to get it built directly into laptops or desktops. You know what that means? For now, we’ve still got the trackpad and the touchscreen.
