Minority Rapport

Sitting in a bar in Edinburgh, I just purely by chance happened to catch a technology article on BBC News talking regarding using eye tracking as a method of computing input. The demonstrations talked about replacing the mouse with simply looking, but for some reason (possibly alcohol related), put me in the mind of the film Minority Report, and the scene with adverts jumping into Tom Cruise’s eye line trying to distract him from going about his business.

I found a few old articles relating to research done at Imperial College London, looking at practical applications, but I started thinking, what if this technology could work without users necessarily being aware of it? Architects are normally pretty bad at actually studying how people use their buildings, so what if we could map what people actually look at when they enter a space? The role that sound plays could be studied, do people look for a specific noise’s source? Do tactile surfaces draw their attention? In short could we learn to better exploit all of our building users senses to orient them within a space?

Continuing on, its a nice idea that buildings could react to an individual, making the user experience personal. A sort of truly interactive building that doesn’t need a user to necessarily understand what’s going on in order to exploit the advantages of the interaction.