(funky music)
- Hey, there, guys.
Zac here for Windows Central,
and welcome back to another video.
Now, today we're taking a look
at the new eye tracking feature coming to Windows 10
with the full Creators Update later this year.
This feature allows you to control your PC
with just your eyes.
So this is an ease of access feature
that Microsoft has been working on
with Tobii and other eye tracking hardware manufacturers,
and what this does is sort of make it easier
for those who have trouble using mice and keyboards
or who can't use mice or keyboards at all,
and allows them to use their PC like normal.
So it does require a bit of extra hardware.
In this case, we're using the Tobii eye tracking 4C device
and it also requires you to install
their third party software as well
just to get things set up and calibrated and whatnot.
It also comes with some interesting games and settings,
which we'll take a look at after,
but for now, I just wanna take a look at the
built-in native stuff that Microsoft has been working on
in Windows 10, so if we jump into ease of access here,
scroll down to other options, you'll see
there's a new option down here called eye control
which is in beta, and once I turn this on,
you'll see at the top of the screen
that a new bar will appear, and this bar will give us
four options that allow us to interact
with the PC with our eyes.
So that's the bar up there.
Now, I'm not looking at it yet
because once I start looking at it,
the bar will begin activating and launching
into different features and stuff.
So if I look away for a minute
or just look down at the bottom of the screen,
I can describe to you what's on the bar,
so at the far left, we have the option
that switches the bar from the top of the screen
to the bottom of the screen.
Next to that, we have the keyboard,
which does pretty much what you would expect.
This is an onscreen keyboard which you can interact with
with your eyes.
To the right of that, we have the
text to speech option, which allows me to type in a sentence
and have the narrator to play that sentence out loud,
and in the far right, we have the mouse option,
which is sort of the onscreen cursor which,
once activated, I can look around and interact
with things on the screen.
We'll take a look at that one first.
So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna raise my hands here
on the webcam so you can see my hands are in the frame,
and I'm gonna look at the mouse cursor up here.
And now I am controlling the mouse on the PC.
Well sort of, this is giving me sort of a highlight
on where I want the mouse to go, and then from there,
I can fine tune the mouse position.
So if I want to close the window here,
I just have to look up at the X in this window,
then I can fine tune my position with the mouse,
and then press the left-click button to close that.
So if I wanna open the start menu,
I can come down here, refine my option,
and then I can launch the start menu like that,
which is fantastic.
So let's do that again, let's launch Edge
like that, pretty simple, and now I can sorta select
the address bar up here.
Select the keyboard and then type in
Ctrl + A for select all,
and I can do delete, then I can type in my own URL.
Windows
Central,
there we go, and then I can press enter on that,
and that will take me to Windows Central.
Fantastic, so let's make this full screen here.
I can do that by quickly navigating
to the full screen button, and there we go.
That window is now full screen, which is fantastic.
So, that's pretty much how it works.
It's really quite simple and really quite fascinating.
Again, I'm not using the mouse and keyboard at all.
In the frame, my hands are still here,
and you can see that's all.
I've been using the entire PC with my eyes all along.
So there's also the text to speech option,
which I can quickly sorta type out a sentence,
but not only that,
this also supports shape writing,
just like on Windows phone and on the tablet's
keyboard on Windows 10 full Creators Update.
So if I turn it on here, and sorta glance at the letters
I want to type, hopefully the keyboard will be smart enough
to form a sentence for me, so I'm gonna say
the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,
which is what I always type,
and hopefully, with this shaped writing,
Windows is able to get that, so let's do that now.
So I'm gonna sort of glance at the T,
and then from there, continue gliding through the keyboard.
The
quick
brown
fox.
Come on, yes.
Jumped
over
the
lazy
dog.
Oh, where's G?
Oh, I went to the wrong place.
Dish, no, I forgot where G was!
Let's backspace on that.
Let's do that again, dog.
There we go, and then I can play it out loud.
And hopefully that played out loud,
and there you go, I have now successfully
typed out a sentence and played that through the narrator.
You might not have heard that.
I apologize if you didn't, but it did play out loud,
and it was really, really, really awesome.
So that's pretty much how typing works on this device.
You can either use the swipe option
or you could not use the swipe option.
It's up to you, it depends on what you're trying to type,
I guess, because sometimes, auto-correct isn't great,
so turning off swipe would be better.
But this isn't the only stuff that the eye tracking does.
That's the Windows 10 stuff.
So Microsoft's work with the eye tracking
is mainly for ease of access users.
As I said, it's to help those who can't use
mice and keyboards get around the system,
but Tobii itself has sort of done
a few additional tweaks that sort of enhance the experience
for those who can use mice and keyboards.
So if we turn on the Windows 10 specific features here,
go back into ease of access,
turn it off and launch the Tobii eye tracker software,
you'll see that in settings, there are a bunch
of different options that are on by default
once you install the software, including this stuff,
so this stuff here's grayed out for a reason,
likely because I'm using this on a laptop,
but on a desktop where this stuff makes sense,
if I walk away from my PC, the screen will know
when to automatically dim or turn off,
and if I walk back in front of it,
it will turn the screen back on.
Just some handy uses like that.
So touch at gaze allows you to quickly jump
around the screen without having to
move your cursor too much, so for example,
if my cursor's sitting around up here, doing its thing,
and I'm staring at the start button,
and I want to get to the start button,
instead of manually moving my cursor
all the way to the bottom left of the screen,
all I have to do is stare at the start button,
place my finger on the trackpad, and as you saw there,
the cursor jumped from the top right
to the bottom left instantly, which is great,
and I can quickly access the start menu like that,
and that also works with the mouse as well,
so you can see here.
You can make the mouse warp on move, so if I'm looking,
if I'm down here, for example, and I wanna quickly get up
to the X of this window, I just have to look at the X
and then quickly move, and hey, there it is.
I'm now up here, ready to go.
So it sorta allows you to move around the screen
a lot quicker.
It's really quite handy, and there's also
additional options here as well.
So within Windows itself,
you can make it so the app knows
to select certain things when you're in certain areas.
So if I'm in the task switcher here, for example,
and I have multiple apps open, that'll help.
If I go to here, if I stare at each one app,
you can see there, and again this isn't me doing that.
I'm staring at Explorer here,
or I'm staring at the settings, Explorer, settings, Explorer
then I can hit enter, and that'll take me
to Explorer like that, which is really quite nice.
There's also additional ones that are currently in beta,
which notification dismiss, which doesn't actually
work for me yet, but what it does is
once you have that on, once a notification comes in,
if you stare at that notification,
the system knows you've seen it,
and then once you look away,
the notification dismisses itself.
I've tried, maybe I can get it working.
Let's see if we can download that.
Hopefully that will pop a notification for us.
So there you go, the notification has popped,
I'm now staring at it, and as you saw there,
there is a sort of highlight that goes around it,
so the system knows I've seen it now.
Hopefully I'll look away, do other things,
and the system should just dismiss it, or not!
It hasn't dismissed it, but the idea is,
it will just dismiss it once you've looked at it,
which is really quiet nice, and just type,
what this does is when you're in Microsoft Edge,
you can stare at the address bar,
and it will highlight it, and I will begin typing
straight away without having to click on anything else.
So I can be, I'm active in the page right now
as you can see here, and then,
all I need to do is stare at the address bar,
and then begin typing, which is really quite nice.
So Tobii itself are doing their own sort of enhancements
to Windows 10 through their own third party software.
Microsoft are doing their own stuff with ease of access,
which allows people to control the PC
directly with their eyes, which is what we demoed at first.
So yeah, that's a very quick look
at the Tobii eye tracking stuff on Windows 10.
It's very exciting, and as you'll see down here,
these two dots are my eyes.
If I close one of my eyes, that will disappear.
The other one.
Close them both, that's it tracking my eyes right now,
which is really quite, quite exciting,
but yes, there you have it, guys.
That's a very quick look at the Tobii
eye tracking stuff in Windows 10.
Thanks so much for watching, and I shall
see you in the next one, bye-bye.
(electronic music)