[bokonon]

I agree with you, but at the same time I think it's great that somebody is at least trying to innovate the tools we have for interfacing with technology. I know handwriting recognition isn't anything new, but the idea that the keyboard is all we will ever need can only contribute to the stagnation of advancement.

I'm still waiting for the day I can telepathically control all my devices.

[stcredzero]

There could be a lot done with eyeball tracking. We already have setups that can accurately determine where you will be looking a fraction of a second in the future.

Eyeball tracking combined with speech or handwriting translation could be quite powerful. The eyeball tracking could provide a lot of contextual information to make speech/handwriting recognition more accurate.

[bokonon]

We already have setups that can accurately determine where you will be looking a fraction of a second in the future.

Do you have a link to more information about this? That's really impressive.

[stcredzero]

One's saccade eye movements are very regular in acceleration profile, so it's possible to determine where you're going to look from the start of the saccade movement.

I could not find the original reference, but there is some highly technical information here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=27jCNmafYU4C&pg=PA150&#...

[jenius]

This is totally incorrect, eye tracking is not sufficiently advanced to be in any way useful in terms of entering input. There exist 'visual keyboards' for people that are paralyzed which allow them to select a key based on where they are looking. These, while a fantastic tool to help disabled people, are not even close to approaching the speed we achieve using a manual keyboard. There's an example here - your eye has to linger for at least a second for the computer to be confident in your choice.

http://www.denverpost.com/recommended/ci_20768271

And it only takes common sense to realize that we don't look at every key we type, and it makes it faster. The quickest typists don't have to look at the keyboard at all, and this increases efficiency. Both handwriting and eye tracking are much much slower than typing, no matter what. You can be the fastest handwriter on the planet, and still a moderately talented typist will burn the shit out of you. It just takes less time to hit a key than it does to write an entire letter form.

I realize my first comment was kind of mean and sarcastic, but that was because this idea is so completely stupid and not progressive at all that I thought the relatively intelligent community on hacker news would realize this immediately. All my friends and co-workers who saw it were like "this is completely dumb"... immediately.

I understand that people like things that are 'different' and 'progressive', but this particular tool is neither of the above. It's a fun little trick that is totally not practically useful in any way.

[stcredzero]

> This is totally incorrect, eye tracking is not sufficiently advanced to be in any way useful in terms of entering input.

Actually, you are totally incorrect. If you look back at the thread, I am not proposing eye tracking as a sole means of input, but as a means of providing contextual information to other means of input.

> I realize my first comment was kind of mean and sarcastic, but that was because this idea is so completely stupid and not progressive at all that I thought the relatively intelligent community on hacker news would realize this immediately. All my friends and co-workers who saw it were like "this is completely dumb"... immediately.

Then at least you or you and your friends are guilty of sloppy reading, of a level I do not expect for HN. Again, this is not proposed as a primary means of input, but as an enhancement to contextual information for speech and handwriting input.

[jenius]

Hey sorry this is so late. Didn't realize what you meant by contextual input or how that could be useful, but you're right - I can't deny such a fuzzy statement. It's somewhat possible that this could help something sometime in the future, definitely. Apologies for calling you incorrect. Eye tracking is however not efficient or useful as a main input for typing and will very likely not take a leading role in helping to recognize word/sentence input to computers.

On the second statement, I meant my original comment about google handwriting, the one at the top of this tree - not your comment about eye tracking. So I apologize again - I must have not been clear in the way I stated that and I'm sorry you took offense.