Chances are, if you have read Benchmark Reviews for any time at all, you have heard of SteelSeries. The gaming peripheral manufacturer announced a partnership at CES with Tobii, an eye-tracking technology company that has been honing their products for a few years now. Tobii is partnering with SteelSeries to bring eye-tracking to the gaming crowd. That’s me.
I sat down at one of the demo systems that Tobii had set up with their EyeX Controller during CES Unveiled: 2014 and tried it out. The first demo was World of Warcraft enabled with eye-tracking. I was a little unsure of what the benefit would be, exactly, but I soon found out. If you play MMORPGs, like WoW, then you are familiar with the tedious need at some point to walk long distances around the expansive worlds. Num-Lock is a life saver in these situations, because it enables auto-run. That’s great until you run into a tree. Eye-tracking comes into play here by allowing you to move left or right and look up or down with eye movements rather than using a keyboard or mouse. So go ahead and enjoy that sandwich while auto-running through the Barrens, you won’t need your hands to unstuck yourself.
Other MMORPG uses for Tobii that were demonstrated include macro-enabled pop-up menus accessed via eye-tracking. For example, you press the middle mouse button and a circular menu of icons such as the character screen, options menu, bags, or otherwise, pops up. By looking at the icon associated with your character screen and releasing the middle-mouse button, you can open up the character screen in a fraction of a second. There is a lot of flexibility here and if you can think of something useful that can be moved to eye-tracking rather than button-pressing, they can probably make it happen.
There was also a demo for a First Person Shooter that allows you to use eye-tracking for oft used functions. Rather than holding down control or c to move forward while crouching, simple hunch down a little in your seat. To stand back, straighten. I often find myself leaning a little to the right or left when looking around corners in games. My wife always laughs at me, but I’m one of those people who moves a static controller all over the place in racing games. Tobii’s eye-tracking system makes that movement mean something, as my character will now react to my movements and look around the corner.
There are plenty of other applications that Tobii is working on for their eye-tracking software. They are currently preparing to offer compatible programming for a number of recent and soon to be released games. Tobii’s platform is also useful for simply selecting things on screen. I use an HTPC connected to my TV for all of my home-entertainment. To navigate, I use a wireless mouse that is constantly being lost or dropped by my kids. The batteries pop out and roll under the couch and now I’m on the floor groping around for a lost battery. With Tobii, I can now select what I’m looking for simply by looking for it.
Tobii is offering the Tobii EyeX developer’s kit starting during CES, which will ship in March if you use the promo code CES2014. It costs $95 and includes the hardware, middleware, and development framework to get you started writing code for Tobii’s eye-tracking solutions.
Here are some explanations of the features from Tobii themselves:
- Natural interaction – Characters’ behavior is influenced by eye contact just as in real life. A shy person might look away. Or someone might become upset if you stare at him too long.
- Revealing intentions – In FIFA, you select the player to whom you want to pass the ball with your gaze so you can continue to operate the selected player with your controls. However, your gaze may also reveal your intentions to your competitors – just as in real life.
- Aiming at gaze point – Aim your flashlight or weapon where you look. Then use the regular controls to shoot.
- Moving as in real life – You move around in a more natural way. Lean forward to look around corners, or pull back to hide. Your gaze reveals your intent, and the opponent may ambush you or change its path.
The next new tech I want to talk about is something that really interests me because of a conversation I just had with my wife last week. We were talking about robot cleaners. Our house is almost entirely tile (welcome to Southern Arizona) and by the time I finish mopping the entire floor, I find it hard to remember a time before I started mopping. Moneual may have the solution to my problem. Moneual actually had a lot of announcements to make at CES Unveiled and they are a CES Innovations 2014 Design and Engineering Award Honoree for five of their futuristic gadgets. I want to focus on just one, however, the Moneual RYDIS H68 Pro Smart Hybrid Robot.
The RYDIS H68 Pro is capable of both vacuuming and mopping and uses what Moneual calls Smart Vision Mapping technology to track and map the best path for cleaning. One of the coolest features is that the H68 Pro can actually mop and vacuum simultaneously. It has the largest water tank of any robot mop in the industry and actually learns as it cleans. The Smart Vision Mapping technology helps the H68 Pro learn the most effective cleaning patterns. It first runs a wall to wall pattern to make sure everything is covered, using to 42 omnidirectional sensors to find obstacles and avoid collisions.
The RYDIS H68 Pro uses a main brush for large particles and twin side brushes as well. It has a BLDC suction motor and a filter that Moneual says can capture 99.5% of particles 0.3 microns or larger. The lifespan of the H68 Pro is more than 5000 hours and the suction motor is supposedly much quieter than your standard DC motor. The RYDIS H68 Pro should be available for purchase sometime in the spring of 2014. While I didn’t get a price, the current H67 model costs $399.
There were a lot of speaker systems at CES Unveiled: 2014, but one of them that stood out to me was the DREAM One from DREAM Audio.
The goal of DREAM Audio with the DREAM One is to eliminate the standard “sweet spots” formed by typical speaker set-ups by providing the same, complete sound quality from anywhere around the speaker system. That way, it doesn’t matter where you are situated with reference to the speaker, you’ll get the best sound experience. With the DREAM One, there shouldn’t be any more need to focus the speakers and sit in a specific location in order to hear the best sound.
The DREAM One is a very versatile speaker system. It is wireless, as are many in the market today, but it provides a very wide level connectivity, allowing you to stream music over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, DLNA, or Airplay from a phone, tablet, computer, or otherwise. To make sure the sound is perfect, the DREAM One plays a spatial test tone to pinpoint your position in the room. After finding you, the DREAM One automaticallyoptimizes the internal equalization and digital signal processor based on your location. That process, of course, works best when using a mobile device, so that the sound optimization follows you. You can also manually set up the audio.
The key to the DREAM One lies in the aluminum Sound Array Module that ensure the 360 degree distribution of the sound. Each DREAM One speaker is a stand-alone stereo speaker system, but it can also be used in tandem with another DREAM One speaker to expand the sound or create different audio zones. The DREAM One’s 2 inch aluminum cone wideband driver, 4 inch paper cone subwoofer, and 5.25 inch paper cone passive radiator provides acoustic output of up to 102dB. The DREAM One should be available by the fall of 2014 for an MSRP of $599.
Another speaker system I got excited about comes from Clear View Audio. The speaker isn’t actually a speaker in the traditional sense. It is actually a piece of clear acrylic set up to vibrate and produce sound. The base of the device carries the electronics and includes a tradition sub-woofer. Due to the congestion during CES Unveiled, I wasn’t able to get a sense of the sound quality of the Clear View Audio speaker, but I set up a meeting for later on in the week to get some alone time with the new speaker. I’ll certainly update with my findings on the matter.
At CES Unveiled: 2014, Samsung Techwin America introduced two new Wi-Fi IP cameras. Samsung already has a robust home security lineup and the addition of the SmartCam HD and SmartCam HD Outdoor brings full 1080p HD streaming along. The two new SmartCams also come with 128 degree ultra-wide angle lenses for improved viewing area. The new SmartCam HDs stream over IP and don’t require any type of monthly fee for monitoring or storage since all of the storage can be done locally using an SD card. Samsung also told me that there was a potential online storage partnership in the works. That, of course, would require a subscription.
Video can be automatically recorded upon sensing motion or audio. When those are detected, you can also opt to have an email or push notification sent to a mobile device. The SmartCam HDs are 2MP cameras. They have a 1/2.8-inch CMOS senor that is designed to let in a large amount of light for richer colors and detail. They also include an IR cut filter for enhanced night viewing in night vision mode. The SmartCam HD has a 16 foot range while the SmartCam HD Outdoor has a 50 foot range. Due for release in March 2014, the Samsung SmartCam HD has an MSRP of $179 and the SmartCam HD Outdoor has an MSRP of $229.
The hugely popular earphone company yurbuds launched a new product showcased at CES Unveiled: 2014 as the Inspire Limited Edition Wireless Earphones. Yurbuds guarantees that the limited edition Inspire earbuds will never hurt and never fall out. They are also stereo-bluetooth capable. The Inspire earbuds have 15mm drivers; pretty big for earbuds. They also have up to a 6-hour active use battery life with audible and visual battery indicators. The technology that guarantees the earbuds won’t fall out is called TwistLock, and FlexSoft is yurbuds way of ensuring that the earphones don’t start to hurt after being in your ear for a while. The Inspire earphones are water and sweat resistant and come in black or red colors. The frequency response is from 20Hz to 20kHz. The limited edition earphones have an MSRP of $169.99.
Another exciting new look I got at CES Unveiled: 2014 was of the new USB 3.1 standard at work. The new USB standard can handle theoretical transfer rates up to 10Gbps; twice as fast as USB 3.0. The new standard doubles the clock rate and uses a 128b/132b rather than 10b/8b coding scheme that lowers the overhead to 3% from 20%. I watched an ATTO test that shows the new USB 3.1 transferring at over 1GB/s (around 8Gbps). At these speeds, the USB folks were streaming 1080p video over USB, directly competing with Thunderbolt.
The folks at the USB consortium also talked to me about a new USB connector, the type C. They couldn’t show me what it looked like, or even describe it to, other than mentioning that it was small and thin in order to better facilitate the thin designs of new mobility devices. I was also told that it will be completely bi-directional, with the cable determining host and client. Of course, typical type-A to type-C cables will also be available for legacy support.
