Innovative uses of Eyetracking technology

Posted on 14/03/2006 by admin

UPDATE late 2009: the idea behind aDAMS has been successfully patented with number ITMI20050494

I’ve nearly finished to prepare the slides for my talk at the Innovation Expo in Milan this Thursday 16th (more details on time/location here): I’ll introduce aDAMS (anti-Drowsiness Alert Management System), an eye-tracker based system which continuously scans the driver’s eyes to evaluate her attention leve and properly activate a scalable alert.

After receiving the data we elaborate a series of analyses based on position of the eyes (mapping on the correspondent street target), size of the pupil, frequency of saccades, blinking activity, etc. etc.; the system also has networking capabilities in order to propagate the alarm. Being base on eye tracking means we’re using infrared light, thus being independent from light condition and being the HCI interaction absolutely natural, with no side effects to the driver.

I know there’s a bunch of other anti-drowsiness systems based on the use of similar technologies, but I pretty sure our systems outstands all the competitor.

Interested in? Curious? Drop me an email or come for a chat on Thursday.

On TED and eTech conferences

Posted on 07/03/2006 by admin

I had a pretty free from urgent tasks morning, so I decided to go through the highly granular report on the TED conference by Bruno Giussani. I met Bruno during the LIFT days in Geneve and I know how well he can blog about live events he’s attending to, that’s why I’ve chosen him as primary source of information on the TED conference (BTW he’s also the producer of TED Global).

It took quite a lot to go through all his TED posts and to follow interesting links, it’s was really tought not to use them as starting points for a broader navigation. And Mike Lee’s Flickr photos was useful to give me a broader scenario awareness of the conference (as for the written report I’ve chosen to restrict my navigation just to one user in order to save time).

Now it’s time for the eTech and I’m missing it this year too (job and personal stuff are keeping me strictly bound to Italy), I consider my self fortunate to have a couple of friends there, I’m really looking forward to their reports.

The Interaction Frontiers 2006

Posted on 01/03/2006 by admin

I spent lunchtime with Leandro Agrò and Flavio de Paoli in a nice Oktoberfest resembling steak house in Bicocca, the uber-modern quarter built in the ex-Pirelli factory area, chatting about new-born babies and the lacks of modern digital compact cameras.

The last minute meeting was set up in order to evaluate the Milano-Bicocca University conference room that’s planned to host this year edition of “The Interaction Frontiers” (you can find the 2005 site, with speakers – including Dirk Knemeyer – bio, abstracts and slides here), which will be the main UXnet Italy event for the current year.

The event is planned to be held on June 16 from 9am to 4pm and will be about

The traditional GUI windows [that] are now enriched by simul-human symbolic representations (avatars), have input devices and sensors capable of collecting emotion rich informations and finally come out from their screens and walk on their own wheels and robot legs.

This year conference room will have seats for 150/200 people, Wi-Fi + plugs will be provided for free to all the attendees and bloggers, so remember to bring your laptop!
Learning from the LIFT06 experience the first 4 seat rows will be reserved to people without computer as the famous laptop free zone.

We plan to have a world renown geek as keynote speaker and a bright minded researcher specialised in emotion capable machines (I’m sorry but cannot be more precise at this stage) plus a top class panel of User Experience/HCI experts and a bunch of great speakers. We have some 15mins speaking slots still available and will open a call for papers once the conference site will be ready (a couple of weeks or so).

I’m really excited to be involved in the organization of such a cuttin edge event which – by the way – will be provided FOR FREE to all. If curious you can find photo details of the conference spaces on Leandro’s Flickr set.