Eye-tracking for code editing

Question

Is there a decent eye tracking package to replace the mouse for code editing?

I want to free up the mouse, but keep using my keyboard for editing code.

Having done some research on it, I concluded that proper eye tracking hardware is expensive. Using a webcam or high resolution video camera seems to be the most viable option.

Unfortunately, image-based tracking (as opposed to infra-red tracking) restricts the accuracy, and so not all features might be practical.

Desired eye-tracking IDE features:

• Page scrolling
• Tab selection
• Setting cursor position
• Selecting gaze-focused text with keyboard

A similar question recommends Opengazer for webcams, but I am particularly interested in speeding up basic text-editing. Any recommendations are appreciated, especially if you have experience with eye tracking and practical use cases.

Answer 1

The kind of accuracy you're looking for is pretty difficult to achieve (Since text tends to be pretty small).

IR tracking is actually pretty easy to accomplish. A few IR LEDs and an IR camera (which is really just a normal camera with different filters) and your pupil lights up (This can be done with under $100, more if you want a better camera though).

It's the head tracking that might be more of an issue.

You end up with quite a few degrees of freedoms that you need to track and your inaccuracies will just build up.

Answer 2

I'm pretty sure there is no out-of-the-box solution for problem, but on eyewriter.org there are really nice instructions how to build your own eye-tracker. It's accurate enought to let someone "draw" graphities using only his eyes. so it should be possible to convert the eye-movements into mouse-events.

Answer 3

It can be done reasonably accurately (al la this article on how people read code) but i've never seen a commercial product that does what you're asking for

Maybe take a look at Emotiv's headsets, they use thought patterns to perform tasks. They're designed for games but you can probably repurpose it for normal tasks

Answer 4

Just use vim. Do more with the keyboard, less with the mouse.

Answer 5

Personally I had an issue always having to reach for a normal mouse, looked at various option eyetracking/voice/touchscreen and ended up changing the keyboard to a IBM Trackpoint end result being my hands never leave the Keyboard and my typing speed and accuracy improved due to not having to reposition my right hand.