The company Honor, known for making phones, introduced its new top-of-the-line model, the Magic 6, at the Qualcomm 2023 Snapdragon Summit. While the event had a lot of discussions about AI (artificial intelligence), one really cool feature that caught everyone’s attention was the ability to control the phone using only your eyes.
In the presentation, they gave us a sneak peek of this technology with a visual. It showed a woman using her phone, and at the top of the screen, there was a part of the Uber app similar to a live activity. What was really cool was that by simply changing the direction she looked, she could make the app go full screen.
Honor calls this technology “Magic Capsule,” but if we use a more precise but less fancy term, it’s essentially “eye-tracking based multimodal interaction.”
The upcoming Magic 6 phone will come with this feature, along with a virtual assistant powered by Qualcomm’s on-device AI. This assistant can do things like gather videos on your device that match specific criteria, improve them with other features, and create a new video that focuses on your chosen clips.
However, it’s unclear how well this feature works because the demo video isn’t a real-world example. It seems more like a flashy feature to impress rather than something efficient with useful applications. Additionally, many of us may not feel comfortable with our phones knowing where we’re looking.
Eye tracking could be handy when your hands are occupied, or it might be designed with the intention of assisting people with disabilities.
In any case, when they talk about “multi-modal,” it implies that gaze tracking is just one part of the system. They might combine it with other gestures to make sure it works well. This could be like what we see in PSVR 2 games, where eye tracking is used to highlight things before you make a selection by clicking.
Even though Honor hasn’t given an exact date for when the Magic 6 will be released, Qualcomm has mentioned that phones with its new top-notch chipset will start showing up in the next few weeks.
