[HN Gopher] Show HN: Eyesite - Experimental website combining co...
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Show HN: Eyesite - Experimental website combining computer vision
and web design
I wanted Apple Vision Pros, but I don't have $3,500 in my back
pocket. So I made Apple Vision Pros at home. This was just a fun
little project I made. Currently, the website doesn't work on
screens less than 1200x728 (Sorry mobile users!) It also might
struggle on lower end devices. For best results, have a webcam
pointing right at you. I tested my website with a MacBook camera.
Any comments, questions, or suggestions are greatly appreciated!
blog: https://blog.andykhau.com/blog/eyesite check it out:
https://eyesite.andykhau.com/ github:
https://github.com/akchro/eyesite
Author : akchro
Score : 112 points
Date : 2025-06-12 00:37 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.andykhau.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.andykhau.com)
| cwmoore wrote:
| I may be the result of some evolutionary bottleneck, but wherever
| there is a camera lens, I assume eye tracking (and sentiment
| prediction) is at least possible, and at most globally always on.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| Next time you see a digital ad display, look for the little
| black circle on top of it. Yes, they do. Feel free to put a
| sticker over it.
| noduerme wrote:
| Just to play devil's advocate here... I'm about as extreme a
| privacy absolutist as you can find. But _given that we 're
| all on camera all the time in public spaces,_ like it or not,
| I don't consider tracking on digital billboards to be
| inherently evil. It _could_ be used for evil (like - an
| authoritarian government tracking who looks at a billboard
| for an opposition political leader, for instance). But it
| could just be innocent data gathering. If you ran a plumbing
| business and paid $10k for a billboard, wouldn 't you want to
| know if it was worth it or not? It's not as if decades of
| focus groups and hand-wavey feelings about what is or isn't
| effective advertising didn't already steer us into a society
| entirely dominated by big loud ads everywhere.
|
| People who make products and sell services need to advertise.
| They in turn pay taxes. The many layers of parasitism in the
| advertising world historically relied on conning these people
| and taking their money in exchange for an unprovable
| proposition, namely that if you run this ad we tell you to
| run, right here, your sales will go up - but we'll never be
| able to actually tell you for sure by how much, or whether it
| was a good deal for you. From that perspective, more and
| better viewership data helps undermine the advertising
| bullshit machine and close the gap between people who run
| businesses and the people they're trying to sell their
| services to.
| jll29 wrote:
| Remember this incident?
|
| Italians deploy fearsome SPY MANNEQUINS to win Fashion Wars
| (2012) https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/22/bionic_manneq
| uins_are...
|
| According to the media at the time, the mannquins quickly
| disappeared again after the scandal broke. If you are more
| cynical, you might question that narrative.
| noduerme wrote:
| I never heard of this, but it's hilarious.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| > People who make products and sell services need to
| advertise.
|
| Do they though?
|
| No one is entitled to better data. It should be on the
| advertisers to figure out more privacy preserving ways of
| getting feedback.
|
| Ubiquitous technical surveillance is, in economics
| parlance, a negative externality.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| We're just going deeper and deeper into attention-grabbing
| displays; we now even have ANIMATED screens next to the
| ROADS in the Netherlands. Flashing, showing texts like
| "WATCH OUT! We have a new product!".
|
| I have epilepsy. It's managed, I mean, I'm allowed to drive
| again. But what about people who don't have it managed (for
| some no meds will work)? They're just f'd when they walk
| down the street and Nike NEEDED to switch the screen every
| 0.2s?
|
| If I can in _any_ way inhibit their ability to grow, I
| will.
|
| If I need your product, I'll find it. I'm against any and
| all ads - I know it's unrealistic, but I'll do everything
| in my power to lower the amount of ads I see or to be a
| nuisance to them.
|
| Really don't care about morality in this case.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >we now even have ANIMATED screens next to the ROADS
|
| Heh, only 30 years behind the US.
|
| Of course our rate of people dying at younger ages over
| here seems to be a lot higher too.
| pzo wrote:
| I'm right now in Malaysia and my residential building
| lifts there are TV playing ads and make many tricks to
| grab attention:
|
| - sound of phone ringing to keep you out of your zone
|
| - loud annoying music with annoying lyrics
|
| - putting cat in advertisement and meowing
| holografix wrote:
| Love this, any experimental HCI project managers inspires me to
| think differently about computers and tech
| naveen_k wrote:
| Ha! The timing is impeccable. This is a great demo. I've been
| experimenting with using gaze and eye tracking for cursor
| prediction as a side project. I like the idea of pressing 'space'
| for each dot. I just had the 9-dot movement going from one point
| to another. I'm using Mediapipe's face landmarks model (I wasn't
| aware of WebGazer). I'll continue to work on it, but it's great
| to see a similar thought process.
| jll29 wrote:
| The WebGaze software used in this page was introduced in by
| Papoutsaki and co-workers by a team from Brown university and
| Georgia Tech in 2016:
|
| - Papoutsaki, A. et al. (2016). " _WebGazer_ : Scalable Webcam
| Eye Tracking Using User Interactions." Presented at the
| International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
| (IJCAI). https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/16/Papers/540.pdf
|
| While we are at it, you may also find the following research
| publications relevant to this discussion:
|
| - "Improving User Perceived Page Load Times Using Gaze" (USENIX
| NSDI 2017) https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi17/technical-
| sessions/...
|
| - "No clicks, no problem: using cursor movements to understand
| and improve search" (Huang, White, Dumais from Microsoft
| Research, ACM SIG CHI '11)
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1978942.1979125
|
| - Virtual gazing in video surveillance (SMVC '10)
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1878083.1878089
| weeb wrote:
| Nice to see people getting interested in eye gaze. There are two
| things that you might like to look at that can help the UX.
|
| 1 - Calibration. Looking at static dots is BORING. The best idea
| I've seen is Tobii's gaming calibration where you look at dots to
| make them wobble and pop. This makes the whole process feel like
| a game, even when you've done it a hundred times before. I would
| love to see more ideas in this space to give a much more natural-
| feeling calibration process - even better if you can improve the
| calibration over time with a feedback loop, when users interact
| with an element.
|
| 2 - Gaze feedback. You are absolutely right that seeing a small,
| inaccurate and jumpy dot does more harm than good. Again, Tobii
| have led the way with their 'ghost overlay' for streamers.
|
| For an example, see the following video. After calibration the
| ghost overlay is used to give approximate feedback. This is
| enough that some naive users are able to make small adjustments
| to a constant calibration error, or at least give feedback that
| the gaze is wrong, not that the UI is not responding.
|
| https://youtu.be/mgQY4dL-09E?feature=shared&t=36
| akchro wrote:
| Thank you for the feedback!
|
| 1 - I experimented with some calibration involving staring at a
| point, but I found it troublesome as blinking would make lead
| to some inaccurate calibration data (webgazer doesn't have
| blink detection). It was also a little more fatiguing since the
| user would have to really focus on staring the entire time. I
| found that it was less mentally fatiguing if the user could
| control their own calibration give themselves room to blink or
| just rest their eyes for a second.
|
| 2 - Ghost overlays is a really good idea. I'll see what I can
| do to implement that feature.
|
| I really appreciate you taking your time to write this!
| naveen_k wrote:
| I have been experimenting with using 5 phases of movements with
| each phase covering different areas of the screen while being
| actively moving. The last phase makes the dot move in a
| Lissajous-like motion which is more fluid like you are
| suggesting.
|
| The challenge is recording and syncing the motion at a higher
| frequency and being able to save without much drift and the
| performance of these landmark/gaze models is often slow.
|
| One more option to speed it up is not to do the eye tracking at
| record time, just record a crop video of the face and the
| screen first at 60Hz and then run the model on each frame and
| update the metadata of the dataset.
| renierbotha wrote:
| This is very cool!! Have you considered making a WebGL game that
| uses eye tracking for things like aiming? Could be very cool and
| one of the very few accessible games
| akchro wrote:
| Thanks for your interest! An eye tracking game is an
| interesting concept. My concern is that there is already a lot
| of overhead used for eye tracking that an entire game on top of
| that would be too laggy to be playable. Also, the eye tracking
| software right now doesn't seem precise enough for things like
| aiming. I could totally see a pure standalone game that
| utilizes eye tracking.
| mdrzn wrote:
| Very cool demo! Once this becomes _good enough_ (now it 's very
| wobbly and requires huge UI) I'd love to be able to read articles
| and navigate just using the eyes. Feels very natural.
| akchro wrote:
| I'm glad it feels natural! I wanted it to feel similar to Apple
| vision pros where the eye tracking just _works_. Hopefully in
| the future, I can just curl up in a blanket and let my eyes do
| all the scrolling when I 'm reading.
| estsauver wrote:
| Hey, I just wanted to say this is one of the coolest demo's I've
| seen all year. This is really, really fun.
| akchro wrote:
| Thanks! It means a lot that people also find my stuff cool
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Screen Too Small This application requires a minimum screen
| size to function properly._
|
| Why?
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(page generated 2025-06-12 23:01 UTC)