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by dmortin 2379 days ago
For link selection the quickest way could be eye tracking, that is your laptop's camera would track your eye and you could press some key to go to the link which you are looking at.

Is there some application which does this?

3 comments

There's been some activity in the gaming community for DIY solutions to track head movement. Or really any accessible way to get in-game head/camera rotation and/or tilting independent of what the mouse or keyboard is doing.

The simplest one is webcam face feed interpretation. It's also the least liked, because it's CPU/GPU intensive.

The most energy efficient one is based on small devices than measure distance between each other via radio signals or something similar. You put one of them on your head. It has the drawback of having to buy the (cheap) devices.

A middle-ground, which is probably the most popular solution, is a funny looking cardboard cutout with IR reflectors or lights that you put on a hat or headphones. Then you use a webcam feed, but its interpretation is much simpler, because the points to track are easily distinguishable.

All the webcam methods have a significant drawback that they require illumination. You either need lights on your head, or your face has to be brightly illuminated (visible light or IR). A light in my face is the last thing I want personally.

A practical analogue in emacs:

To open any link shown on the screen: 1. look at a visible link 2. press "o" + appeared keys to open the link

https://github.com/abo-abo/ace-link#usage

To move cursor to any place on the screen (keyboard as a mouse) e.g., https://github.com/abo-abo/avy#avy-goto-word-1

Unfortunately built in webcams do not have sufficient resolution and low enough latency to be suitable for this purpose.
Maybe it could be worth it to buy a proper external camera for this purpose if one has a desktop or uses one's laptop most of the time stationary.

I searched for it and apparently Windows 10, for example, has optional eye tracking control built in already:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4043921/windows-10-...

I have used https://eviacam.crea-si.com/ on a laptop successfully.