Towards perceptual computers

By N. N. Sachitanand

BANGALORE, JAN. 2. IBM's Almaden Research Centre, located on a 690-acre tract in the foothills of south San Jose, about 55 miles southeast of San Francisco, is one of eight laboratories worldwide that make up IBM Research. Almaden is famous for developing the first commercial hard disk drive and inventing the relational database and structured query language. But these days Almaden is being talked about for its work in developing technologies that improve the ease of use of computers. This work is being carried out by the User Sciences and Experience Research (USER) Group, a team of about 40 researchers led by Senior Manager Dan Russell. This correspondent was one among a group of fortunate journalists from the Asia Pacific region which was recently given a glimpse of the work being done by the USER Group.

One of the major constraints of using computational devices at present is the need to use tedious and awkward-to-use input devices such as a keyboard or a mouse . Think how much easier it would be if a computer could respond to a user's needs through more "human" inputs such as a spoken command, a look or a gesture? A project code-named BlueEyes, under the wider umbrella of the USER Group, aims to create computational devices which have human-like perceptual abilities.

Human cognition depends on highly developed abilities to perceive, integrate, and interpret visual, auditory and touch information. Blue Eyes uses non-obtrusive sensing technology, such as video cameras and microphones , to identify and observe a user's actions, and to extract key information, such as where the user is looking and what the user is meaning to convey by way of voice or gesture. These cues are analysed to determine the user's physical, emotional or informational state, which in turn can be used to do what the user desires or provide the information he wants.

One such cue which the BlueEyes research group has successfully worked on is gaze the direction in which a person is looking. Using a special technique which employs infra-red rays to track pupil movements, a system has been developed to sense where the user is looking. This has been used in two technologies which enable more productive computer-user interaction.

One, called SUITOR (short for Simple User Interest Tracker), fills a scrolling ticker on a computer screen with information related to the user's current task. SUITOR knows where you are looking, what applications you are running , and which Web pages you are browsing. If, for instance, the user is reading a Web page about IBM, the SUITOR will present in side windows the latest stock price or news stories that are related to IBM.

The other system, which was demonstrated to the visiting journalists by researcher Dave Koons, is known as Magic Pointing. It allows the user's eyes to affect the movement of the cursor, a long time dream of computer designers. A gaze-tracking camera mounted on the computer roughly positions the cursor to the area of the screen where the user is looking. Finer movements of the cursor can then be done by using the normal pointing device like a mouse. Having the eyes wholly determine cursor movement turns out to be impractical, because many eye movements are involuntary and total eye control of the cursor will soon exhaust the user.

Mr. Myron Flickner, a manager in the USER Group , expects that within five years, eye-tracking technology will be common. It will be particularly useful in the home of the future, containing a multiplicity of computing devices. It will enable the user to direct voice commands at a particular device by gazing at it , so that the other devices in the room are not confused by the order. A more immediate use of this technology, in combination with speech recognition, is for wheelchair-bound persons, who can now hope to operate different devices in a room with a mere directed gaze.

BlueEyes technology can be implemented in computer training or education programmes, enabling computers to observe students' emotional state (frustration and excitement) and, just as any good human instructor, adjust information delivery accordingly. Indeed, applications of BlueEyes technology are limitless from designing cars and developing presentations to interactive entertainment and advertising.

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