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Micah Sargent (1:25)

Coming up on Hands on Apple, let's take a look at eye tracking control on your iOS device. Stay tuned.

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Micah Sargent (1:38)

This is twit. Hello and welcome. Or welcome back to Hands on Apple. I am Micah Sargent and today we're taking a look at a set of features that will allow you to use your eye movement to actually control your iPhone. Now this is a feature that, you know, many people probably don't need to use, but if for any reason you find yourself needing to use it, or if you want to, well, this is how you go about setting it up. Now this is a feature that I recently saw, I was scrolling through, I want to say Instagram and I saw someone talking about setting this up and sort of pushing it as this feature that you know, oh, cool new way to do this or do that. As I always talk about accessibility features, I think it's important to remember that these aren't hidden features that are tucked away and for you to find for excitement, but instead are features that can empower you and other users to make use of their devices in ways that they may not otherwise be able to. So let's head over to iOS and take a look. Now, I have a special setup here. I'm going to talk about that in a moment because you actually do need to have your iPhone within one foot here. Let me adjust things a little bit within one foot of your face and on a stable surface. So let me get the iPhone rolling here and we'll switch over. Now in order to access eye tracking, we'll go into the settings app, we'll scroll down to accessibility and we will scroll down to physical and motor. Within this section you can see that there's voice control, eye tracking and head tracking. And today we're taking a look at eye tracking. Now with this, it says eye tracking allows you to control your device using just your eyes. IPhone should be on a stable surface about one foot away from your face. And that is exactly what we have. So with this, before we actually do the setup for this, I just want to kind of talk about the features here. The first part is smoothing. And so this lets you change kind of how the pointer that you have on the screen based on your eye movement will move across the screen. More smoothing means it kind of glides along. Less smoothing means it's more directly tracked to how your eyes are moving. Snap to item will of course kind of move that pointer to nearby items. Zoom on keyboard keys will let you kind of more easily see the different keyboard keys as you're typing something out. Auto hide will, as you imagine, kind of hide things out of the way as needed. Dwell control is a way for you to kind of perform specific actions on parts of the screen by keeping your attention there. So your dwell, essentially you're dwelling on that area and so then you can kind of do the action and then show face. Guidance is just helpful in determining what you need to do to properly make eye tracking work. So let's open up eye tracking by turning it on. We'll toggle it on. And the first part of the process is to actually complete the training. So this says move away from the camera. So I am. There we go moving my face down a little bit. And now it says follow the dot with your eyes as it moves around the screen. So we will do that. And it is moving around on the screen, changing color a little bit. The circle is appearing in different colors and it is moving to different parts of the screen. Up across the top, down near the bottom, and sort of bottom center as well. And as this moves around, I'm just moving my eyes to focus on that spot. And then what's happening is the built in sensors on the front of the iPhone are tracking my eye movement to determine where things need to move. Now as you can see, as I can See, I'm moving my eye around to go to different parts of the screen. Now if I stay on one of those spots for too long, it will enable that area. So I'm looking down near the bottom, kind of going up. If I move back down to the bottom and over to the right, I need to try to get. There we go. Oh, almost. I'm trying to get my eyes to focus or trying to get the screen to focus on this section on the right here, which is a little button that lets you control how different parts of the screen work. And what I'm trying to get to is scroll. Now, as you can see, this isn't super accurate. And so we might go ahead and turn this off so you can see I'm trying to move my eyes over to the. Yes. And you may find that you need to retrain it if you run into issues. So now I've turned off eye tracking. What we can do from that point is turn it back on and complete the process again, centering my face in the camera and tilting my head down just a hair. And we'll complete this process again and see if it improves. We're going to follow the dot on the screen without me moving my head as much. And this is where it's important to have your phone on a stable surface. So I actually have a sort of tripod setup going with the phone in a very firm tripod such that it does not move or jostle at all, especially during this setup part where it is needing to look at how my eyes actually move around on the screen. And typically for people who are making use of this feature, they I can already see a bit of an improvement, which is good. Their head is not likely to move very much and so because of that it becomes easier for them to perform eye tracking. So there we go. I was able to turn it off that time with my eyes.