Eyetracking for the iPhone?

Question

Has anyone experimented with eyetracking for the iPhone or heard of projects related to eyetracking in iOS?

Is it technically feasible at all?

How problematic would recording that data be in the light of ongoing privacy discussions?

Diurnal

Are you talking about eye-tracking as in 'knowing where the user is looking at'? Or are you talking about iris recognition? – Pique

I am talking about knowing where the user is looking on the screen (or off the screen, for that matter). – Diurnal

Then I don't get the face-recognition tag, neither do I think privacy is an issue. I have little knowledge of eye-tracking but I would think that it would be a pain: small screen size and variability of everything (distances & angles of eyes, screen and head). – Pique

You are right about the tag. Took it out. Privacy is surely an issue, I think. People are very sensitive about what you track (especially in Europe). Of course you would do something with the data, too. Like record the time a user actually looked at the screen vs. time where no one looked at the screen. – Diurnal

..and send that back to a server? Then I definitely agree! – Pique

;) I see many scenarios where eye tracking would make sense. One of them is knowing whether your app is just on or anyone is actually using it. – Diurnal

Answer 1

I think this is feasible as long as the phone's camera is pointed at the user's head. It would probably require pretty good light for the image to be crisp enough for it to be able to recognize the face and eyes properly, though.

When the user isn't looking directly at the camera, you would probably need to do some sort of "head recognition" and determine the orientation of the user's head. This would give you a rough direction on where they are looking.

I'm not aware of any face recognition related projects for iOS, but you could probably google and find some existing project in some other language and port it to iOS with a bit of effort.

As a side note, there's a DIY project for the head orientation tracking part for PC. It uses infrared lights placed for example on your headphones and a camera which determine the orientation of your head based on that. Perhaps it'll give you some ideas.

Eozoic

Answer 2

Eyetracking on the iPhone is technically feasible now in 2023. There are several tools making it possible. Apple's ARKit, for example, which was introduced in 2017, supports both eye-tracking and head movement tracking through the front-facing camera on iOS devices. You can find their documentation here.

For privacy discussion, most tools like the ARKit don't record data themselves—they only provide the raw tracking data. Any recording would need to be implemented by the developer, leading to potential privacy concerns.

Several projects have applied tools like the ARKit to implement eye-tracking techniques. A specific project I was a part of and familiar with is called Athena. You can take this as a reference if interested.

Naga