Apple Acquires German Eye Tracking Firm SensoMotoric Instruments

[frifra]

The German law firm is called HEUKING not Hiking! Autocorrect?
[doublepost=1498521995][/doublepost]

I'm excited about nearly every Apple product that's come out, but I'll say the same thing about this that I said about Google Glass.

I don't understand why anyone would buy this. The concept is neat, but I don't see it having any success in the real world. Having data pop up while you're going about your business would be incredibly distracting. People wear glasses because they have to... because their eyesight sucks or the sun is in their eyes. I don't see people paying hundred of dollars to wear something on their face unless they absolutely have to.

Also, the cameras make people nervous and they will undoubtedly create a lot of attention that will create awkward conversations when you're just trying to go about your business.

Am I missing something here? It seems like it'd be useful, but not enough to warrant all the downsides that come with it.

Well they already would be great for repairing stuff, e.g. your car. You would see what tool to put where with how much force in which direction etc.

Or soldering/repairing a notebook are other stuff.

 

[ILikeAllOS]

Too many employees in here...
Obviously Apple isn't making glasses, they're just using the eye tracking tech from this company for the iPhone, most likely next year.
This years iPhone already is rumored to have some kind of "iris" feature, most likely related to this.

 

[DamoTheBrave]

And it will be known as the iEye

 

[Pilgrim1099]

Keep in mind how many times in the past Apple came up with something incredibly unexpected. People had no idea there'd even be a use case for such an item until Steve was showing it off on stage, and then suddenly it was sooo simple, why didn't anyone think of that?

This product will be useful, but not in its current form. The team at Apple has a year - maybe two - of integration work ahead of them. But this was the major piece missing from the puzzle, the new skunkworks project I've been telling this forum about for nearly two years.

This is part of Project Magic. Its the last thing Steve was about before he died. And its going to be insanely great.

He's LONG gone. The Magic has left Apple about 4-5 years after he passed on. The road map kind of dissipated by then, even if you've been saying for nearly two years.

Even if it's going to be sooooo simple, it's going to be related to the iOS or OS X platform for AR or VR. Possibly the car automation system to alert drivers to track how they're visually keeping an eye on the road.

 

[citysnaps]

If Google Glass makes one look like a cyborg then this makes one look like a cydork.

With respect to Google Glass... in San Francisco we just called people wearing them Glassholes.

 

[Bob Zimmerman]

It's hard to overstate what a big deal this technology is for VR. Right now, VR headsets suck massively. They have the equivalent of 20/100 vision or so, and they require absurdly powerful GPUs to run because they have to render every pixel all the time. If we go to sharper displays, they'll require far, far more processing power.

The funny thing is our eyes are only really detail-sensitive in a very small area called the fovea. Our brains fill in everything else from what we remember being there. So we're spending all this processor power and electricity to render huge numbers of pixels when the user can only possibly see a tiny number of them from any given frame.

Eye tracking allows the computer to guess where the fovea is on the frame. This allows the computer to render only that area at high detail, and render everything else much rougher. This is called foveated rendering, and it has the potential to allow phone GPUs to render convincing VR at nearly-arbitrary display sizes.

For people curious about the science behind this, check out some of the research into a phenomenon called saccadic masking. When our eyes move, we go momentarily blind. Again, our brains fill in the detail so we don't perceive the gap. This and the unimportance of detail outside the fovea have been proven with some fascinating experiments involving these sorts of gaze trackers.

I still think VR is a gimmick rather than something actually useful, but more pervasive deployment may change that.

 

[4RUNRCLB]

From the looks of it Apple's testing their new AR glasses out in Nova Scotia.

I laughed so hard at this. Gotta love bubbles.

 

[FactVsOpinion]

[doublepost=1498549951][/doublepost]

Amazing. But I wonder what effect will it have on the wearer's vision? My vision, for example, has worsened because of my extended use of the iPad. Will the rumored AR device cause more damage to my eyes?

Or your eyes would have worsened anyway. Attributing the change specifically to iPad use is little more than a guess.

Consider, also, all the people who use their phones as much as you use your iPad, if anything, it's probably held closer to the eyes and is even worse than ipad use.

 

[Michaelgtrusa]

The good thing is that unlike some nations that have ulterior motives when buying a asset, Apple won't close it down and move it back overseas.

 

[jxj24]

I know a few cognitive scientists, psychologists and neuroscientists that are going to be a little worried about whether the company is going to continue to offer research-grade eye trackers....

Most of us who needed research-grade trackers (in particular high framerate sampling -- 250 - 2000 Hz) were switched to SMI's spinoff company SR-Research years ago.

I've been using SMI/SR equipment for nearly 20 years. The architecture and APIs are excellent and allow very deep access to the tracker. If you are interested, do a web search for Eyelink programmers guide. I do not know how close this is to SMI anymore, as they have had more than a decade to diverge (SMI going in a more commercial direction, while SR-Research remained focused -- as the name suggests -- on research applications).

Psychophysicists and human factors folks still have plenty of alternatives, including Tobii, iScan, and (my preference) Arrington Research.

 

[Sill]

He's LONG gone. The Magic has left Apple about 4-5 years after he passed on. The road map kind of dissipated by then, even if you've been saying for nearly two years.

Even if it's going to be sooooo simple, it's going to be related to the iOS or OS X platform for AR or VR. Possibly the car automation system to alert drivers to track how they're visually keeping an eye on the road.

I think you misread my post. I wasn't talking about "project magic" as in "the magic of the Apple project process" or whatever you were thinking when you bolded my phrase. There is an actual project at Apple, known colloquially as Magic. Its been going on since well before Steve died, and its been ramping up as technology becomes available. Its AR-specific, and I doubt VR will have much of a presence.

I know a lot of the story, and I've posted bits of it here and there on the forum. The Apple Watch is part of it, believe it or not, and the one little quote in Isaacson's biography about tv "I cracked it, I finally cracked it" also relates to it, though tv will be a byproduct of Magic, and not the focus of it.

The autonomous driving project you mention is a subset of this, but its a red herring. Project Titan is doing a great job of distracting Google as well as generating some extremely useful code for Apple, and thats all. The interaction with the environment is the key to Titan, not the actual self-driving car, though Apple could make a few bills off that. They're not looking for another product here.

I'm not going to give up much more than this, because I really, really want to see Apple nail this concept and make it a reality. If Google figures out what Apple is doing and they beat Apple to market with their own version of this - and believe me they will if they know the plan - the damage to Apple is going to be serious, and it will also place society at an extreme disadvantage, believe it or not. This project is that important. It has the potential to be the greatest, most world-changing thing they've done in years, perhaps since the beginning of Apple Computer.

Magic is also why I think Forstall is coming back, btw. Cook has been following a recipe so far, and doing it well. At some point creative direction is going to have to be injected back in to the company. Thats just a theory of mine, but this latest purchase along with Forstall's sudden reappearance on the public scene makes me think I'm right.

 

[elev8d]

I know a few cognitive scientists, psychologists and neuroscientists that are going to be a little worried about whether the company is going to continue to offer research-grade eye trackers....

I'm in marketing research and we use their products quite a bit.
[doublepost=1498575017][/doublepost]

It's hard to overstate what a big deal this technology is for VR. Right now, VR headsets suck massively. They have the equivalent of 20/100 vision or so, and they require absurdly powerful GPUs to run because they have to render every pixel all the time. If we go to sharper displays, they'll require far, far more processing power.

The funny thing is our eyes are only really detail-sensitive in a very small area called the fovea. Our brains fill in everything else from what we remember being there. So we're spending all this processor power and electricity to render huge numbers of pixels when the user can only possibly see a tiny number of them from any given frame.

Eye tracking allows the computer to guess where the fovea is on the frame. This allows the computer to render only that area at high detail, and render everything else much rougher. This is called foveated rendering, and it has the potential to allow phone GPUs to render convincing VR at nearly-arbitrary display sizes.

For people curious about the science behind this, check out some of the research into a phenomenon called saccadic masking. When our eyes move, we go momentarily blind. Again, our brains fill in the detail so we don't perceive the gap. This and the unimportance of detail outside the fovea have been proven with some fascinating experiments involving these sorts of gaze trackers.

I still think VR is a gimmick rather than something actually useful, but more pervasive deployment may change that.

VR is definitely not a gimmick, it's a new medium like TV was versus the Radio. I've had an HTC Vive since April 2016, and it's now my primary form of entertainment and creative outlet.

 

[name99]

Wearing glasses when your eyesight is fine sounds so incredibly hipster.

Actually hipster is doing things in a MORE DIFFICULT, LESS FUNCTIONAL way to prove something (god knows what) about how authentic(?) or whatever you are. Shaving with a straight-edge razor. Using vinyl or a VCR. that sort of thing.

As for the value of smart glasses, yeah yeah, we all heard the naysayers before the Apple Watch came out and even today. We all heard the naysayers when Airpods came out. Hell we heard these naysayers when the iPhone1 came out.
Let me confidently predict that the world is bigger than your small imaginations...

(Of course in ten years these same people will be telling us that, sure, they saw the potential in eyeOS right away; just like you can't find anyone today willing to admit that they slagged the first iPhone.)
[doublepost=1498591010][/doublepost]

Eye tracking glasses at Hooters could add value to employee evaluations.

Don't be so short-sighted!

Here's how this will actually play out (quite seriously... the world had better get ready for this...)
Pretty soon someone is going to train a neural network to generate the appropriate naked body 3D model from a collection of clothed images. (Because that's what smart boy nerds in their late teens/early twenties do...) And this algorithm, give it a fancy name like TOPLESS, will work pretty damn well because, let's face it, it's not THAT hard a problem. And once you have that algorithm in place and working, why not hook it up to video? At which point you have genuine "X-ray specs" of the kind you'd actually want, seeing through clothes. SUre they're not perfect --- they're giving you a "best approximation" to the underlying body, and you're not going to see personal details like scars or tats. Think that will make a difference?

And at that point, woohoo...

I know this sounds like a joke, but get real here guys, this IS GOING TO HAPPEN. It's the natural confluence of technologies like NNs, 3D modeling and AR. And if you think it's going to cause a fuss here in the US, ask yourself what's going to happen when every young man in the Arab world is wearing glasses with that functionality...
[doublepost=1498591386][/doublepost]

Too many employees in here...
Obviously Apple isn't making glasses, they're just using the eye tracking tech from this company for the iPhone, most likely next year.
This years iPhone already is rumored to have some kind of "iris" feature, most likely related to this.

Why is obvious that Apple isn't making glasses? Apple is in the business of selling a personal compute eco-system based on a dispersed network of computers in various form factors. They have the pocket computer and wrist computer today, and the first tentative stab at the ear computer. (Airpods today are like AppleTV 1 --- not yet even a generic computer, let alone one open to 3rd party programs --- but things change...) The eye computer is going to be added to that collection, it's just a matter of time.

What Apple WILL do, which Google did not, because Apple is not populated by morons, contrary to widespread belief in the comment section, is that Apple WILL lay the groundwork for social acceptance of these devices. So, by kickstarting AR on phones, they build up a critical mass of users who start to say "it's really convenient to see all this info overlaid on the real world, but I wish I didn't have to hold my phone to use it". Likewise they'll probably put something in the glasses to either prevent recording, or light up a very obvious LED or something to make it obvious they are recording. etc etc

 

[AppleComputer]

Eye tracking glasses at Hooters could add value to employee evaluations.

Hahahaha. Indeed, oh the possibilities.

 

[ActionableMango]

VR is definitely not a gimmick, it's a new medium like TV was versus the Radio.

Every single person I person know with VR has fallen into one of two categories:

1. Bought it, tried it, was amazeballs at first, but over time realized the graphics are bad, the headset gear is an extra hassle, and the games seem mostly like VR tech demos. They are now back to playing regular games 99% of the time.
2. People like me who cannot tolerate it and get VR sickness in just a few minutes.

VR has a crap ton of potential for changing everything, but I feel like we aren't there yet. In another 10 years we will know if they succeeded in dealing with the challenges and become the next TV/Radio, or if they've become the next 3DTV/Kinect/PSMove/Powerglove/Netbook.