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03.08.13
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SENSOMOTORIC
INSTRUMENTS
TALKING PLACES
PRICE: €20,000 ($26,070)
AVAILABILITY: TBD
THE BREAKDOWN: TALKING
PLACES COMBINES GOOGLE
GLASS AND GOOGLE GOGGLES-
ESQUE FUNCTIONALITY IN A
WEARABLE TOUR GUIDE.
SensoMotoric Instruments is a
company that builds eye-tracking goggles
for research and teaching projects,
and the DFKI is the German center for
artificial intelligence. Together, the pair
has cooked up Talking Places, a Google
Glass-esque concept that is designed to
help people navigate unfamiliar locations.
The hardware contains six infrared
lights, designed to bounce invisible
rays straight into your eyes. An infrared
camera in each lens then picks up
those signals and uses them to coordinate
the location of your pupils, tracking
what you’re looking at. If it senses
that you’ve fixed your gaze on a specific
location for more than a few seconds,
a nose bridge-mounted HD camera will
take a 50 x 50 pixel snapshot and compare
it to its image database — much
like Google Goggles.
After the unit had finished calibrating,
it was instantly able to pick out wherever
we pointed our eyes. We were a little
nervous, not only in case we were caught
looking at an unsuspecting member of
the public — but also if we sneezed, sending
the €20,000 hardware flying across
the hall. We were also treated to a walking
tour of the floor using the SMI goggles,
which were able to show on a laptop
exactly where we were pointing our eyes.
While this gear is primarily used for research,
there’s a hope that a museum in
Kaiserslauten will adopt Talking Places as
a tour guide.