An Indian-origin researchers and team have developed a software, which can turn any smartphone into an eye-tracking device. The discovery could be helpful in psychological experiments and marketing research.

In addition to making existing applications of eye-tracking technology more accessible, the system could enable new computer interfaces or help detect signs of incipient neurological disease or mental illness.

Aditya Khosla, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said that, "Since there are no applications, there's no incentive for people to buy the devices. We thought we should break this circle and try to make an eye tracker that works on a single mobile device, using just your front-facing camera."

Indian-American researcher Khosla and his colleagues from MIT and University of Georgia built their eye tracker using machine learning. It is a technique in which computers learn to perform tasks by looking for patterns in large sets of training examples.

"Currently, their training set includes examples of gaze patterns from 1,500 mobile-device users," Khosla said.

Previously, the largest data sets used to train experimental eye-tracking systems had topped out at about 50 users.  Khosla explained that, to assemble data sets, "most other groups tend to call people into the lab."

"It's really hard to scale that up. Calling 50 people in itself is already a fairly tedious process. But we realised we could do this through crowdsourcing."

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Nandini