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Senseye hands-on, or how I learned to play 'Fruit Ninja' with my eyes (video)

Senseye hands-on, or how I learned to play 'Fruit Ninja' with my eyes (video)

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We played Fruit Ninja with our eyes at the Utechzone booth at Computex 2012.

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senseye fruit ninja stock 1024 eye tracking
senseye fruit ninja stock 1024 eye tracking

In December, we told you how a technology called Senseye could let you control your phone just by looking at the screen. The applications for good eye-tracking technology are far-reaching: you can imagine how it might assist chefs, doctors, and other professionals who need their hands free or who suffer a physical disability. That's not the Senseye we spotted at Computex 2012, but we ran across a very similar idea at the show from a company called Utechzone, and I'm proud to say, I used the software to become the deadliest slicer of virtual fruit I could possibly be.

As you can see in the video above, it's a fairly chunky system right now, and one that's been around since 2010: just a really pricy infrared camera with built-in IR LEDs and some custom calibration software that you use before each and every session to make sure it can follow your pupils around. It really can bring a new dimension to games like Fruit Ninja, though, and I'm being completely serious about that: since a bomb explodes the instant you look at it, you have to use your peripheral vision to keep them out of your sight, and it's also simply much faster to look at a piece of fruit to slice it, rather than having to look and then swipe to get the job done.

Just imagine the natural progression from multitouch screens and depth cameras like Kinect: this could be the way many of our devices work in a decade or two.

Update: Utechzone, which makes the tracker above, tells us that its Senseye and the Senseye we heard about in December actually aren't the same thing. Though they have the same name and the same exact idea, and both are in talks with phone and tablet firms, they're apparently in development at two different companies. In fact, the one that lives at Senseye.net seems to be aware of a naming issue. "A new name will be assigned to our software by June, 2012," the website reads.