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No Need for a Mouse Anymore

In the future there will be no need for a mouse or a keyboard in order to use computers. They will be simply controlled by the user`s eye movements. London`s Imperial College Scientists are working on a technology that tracks the eyes movements and analyses the way we look at things.Professor Guang-Zhong Yang of the Department of Computing at Imperial College said that "eye-trackers will one day be so reliable and so simple that they will become yet another input device on your computer, like a much more sophisticated mouse".

In order to understand how the eye moves when given a task, the scientists use an infra-red eye-tracking headset. People that participate in the research are shown an image and given a limited amount of time to find a specific target on this image, such as a waving hand in a crowd. This requires as much mental effort as, for example, solving a crossword puzzle. The scientists are trying to understand how this visual knowledge works.

Professor Yang believes eye-tracking technology could help the way we interact with computers. Other potential uses of this technology include installing an eye-tracker in a car dashboard to warn a driver who is falling asleep.