Our photo director, Jim Merithew, once said that he hates cameras — he just wants to blink to take a picture with his eyes. Now he can.
A new camera concept, called Iris, aims to use eye-tracking technology and biometric detection to provide an impressively frictionless device for taking photos.
“When we are learning to use a camera we are really training ourselves to adapt to the product, and I believe it should also be the other way around,” says Mimi Zou, a 24-year-old American and recent graduate in Innovation Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art in London. “Products should be more intelligent and they should have the ability to also adapt to us.”
With Iris, eye-tracking controls all the mechanics of the camera. To make the camera zoom in you squint slightly. To make it zoom out you open your eyes. And to fire the shutter you hold your gaze and blink twice. At the moment, Zou says she has a working prototype, but that camera still mimics the mechanics through its software.
From the product shots it’s hard to tell where all the components of Iris are located, but Zou says that instead of looking straight through the lens the viewer will actually be looking at a digital display, which is mounted on one end.
The digital display will create a backing where the camera’s shutter and the sensor will be located. In order to squeeze in a battery and a processor, Zou says she’s already located manufacturers that produce curved products that will fit into her design.
Mechanical specifics aside, the real innovation of the camera is that it will not only react to eye movements, but instead develop a relationship with its user over time. When a user picks up the camera, it scans his iris and can immediately determine his identity as long as he’s registered his biometric data in the camera’s software. Once it recognizes the user, the camera automatically pulls down a series of previously created preferences.
Zou, for example, is near-sighted, so Iris would recognize her and immediately set the diopter so she can see clearly. Some people might like a certain aesthetic to their photos — like a low depth of field for example — so the camera would set the aperture accordingly.
Another proposed feature, like the recently featured Google Glass, is biometric recognition to identify the subjects in the pictures. To participate these subjects would need to provide their consent and biometric information, which would be stored on a proprietary Iris server.
Zou says her version of this technology is actually inspired by several pieces of open-source software including Project Iris. Same goes for the eye-tracking software. The package implementation of everything into a single, slick package, however, is the killer feature.
Using the camera’s built in wifi capabilities, would both help the camera identify its subjects and tell it whether they wanted their photos sent to a particular location like a cloud or Facebook.
The final product seems to be a long way off, if it happens at all, but Zou’s past successes make us optimistic that Iris could eventually make it to market. As an intern she was part of the team that helped develop the Nike+ SportBand. She was also part of a team that helped develop the media:scape system which is designed to facilitate digital conferencing.
Over the next couple of months Zou says the biggest hurdles are refining the prototype and locating funding for manufacturing. She says several people have approached her about helping her with a Kickstarter campaign and she says that might very well be the direction she goes.
Even if Iris doesn’t become a reality, it’s conceptual designs like this that can drive future innovation by camera manufacturers and the industry as a whole. For her part, Zou says she’s determined to make Iris a go.
“This is definitely a product I want to get out into the world,” she says.
