[psychstudio]

I used to work in eeg and eye tracking software (for neuro-motor rehabilitation and control of robotic arms). Using gaze for fine control is very difficult and terribly unnatural due to saccades and general scene scanning. One easy way to demonstrate how difficult it is is to have a cursor appear at the point of gaze. You're vision "chases" the cursor away from your target like it does a floater. Controlling anything directly with gaze is very very hard.

[jcims]

I always find it odd how smoothly the eye can track something but voluntary movement is herky jerky.

[formerly_proven]

Ah you see these are different “hardware features”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_pursuit

[MichaelCollins]

> One easy way to demonstrate how difficult it is is to have a cursor appear at the point of gaze. You're vision "chases" the cursor away from your target like it does a floater.

That sounds like a slight miscalibration of the eye tracker. Assuming perfect eye control, if the tracker estimates your gaze slightly incorrectly then the cursor will always move away when you try to look at it.

[brtkdotse]

> Assuming perfect eye control

No such thing. The eye does constant micro movements and the brain filters this out. You can compensate for this in software but it lowers the target accuracy.

[dopu]

It’s no wonder that it takes us many months of training to get monkeys to perform simple saccade-based tasks.