Silent communication

even with the tremendous improvement in computer technology, the computer-human interface is still relatively primitive. Most of the times, one needs to sit down on a keyboard and type laboriously. Maximum, one can dictate into a software programme, which then creates a file. Now a new software package called Dasher by its developers has the ability to use our eyes to select the appropriate letters. The software has been developed by scientists at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, the uk.

It has an eye-tracking device that is used for selecting a letter from the screen. The software then prompts you with various possibilities and you choose the next letter. This process goes on. The creators of the software have trained it to learn English by using passages from Lewis Carroll as well as other classics. It also has the ability to remember the user's favourite words as it goes along.

Eye-tracking devices of some kind already exist but they are not very efficient. For instance, cameras which follow eye movements can be hooked up with keyboards and used for typing. But the best speed with these devices is about 15 words per minute. In contrast, with Dasher, speeds of over 25 words per minute can be reached easily. The reason for this is the predictive ability of the software that learns the language quickly and thus speeds things up.

Surprisingly, the bottleneck is not the software but the eye tracking hardware. As is expected, every time the eyes look anywhere else, the eye-tracking device needs to be recalibrated.

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