Microsoft Patents Technology To Type Text Through Eye Gaze

Recently an interesting patent from Microsoft was published by USPTO. This patent describes technology for entering text into a computing device via eye-typing. Usually, to interact with a device, users may type in terms using a physical keyboard or on-screen keyboard. Access to physical keyboard or on-screen keyboard is always not possible and eye-typing may become useful in those cases.

Standard eye-typing techniques involve a user fixating his or her gaze on each key for a relatively long period of time as the eye-typing system processes the user’s gaze and determines an intended letter on a key-by-key basis. This may result in an unsatisfactorily long process, and/or may result in user fatigue. Thus, the disclosed embodiments are directed to eye typing via movements that may be more natural to perform. For example, as described in more detail below, by gathering a plurality of gaze samples taken from an initiation of eye-typing until an indication that the user has finished eye-typing, and then processing the plurality of gaze samples together, entire words may be processed at one time. This may allow the user to fixate on each key for a relatively short amount of time. Pattern recognition and/or fuzzy matching of keys may be utilized on the gaze samples to determine one or more likely words typed by the user.

Source: USPTO