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Smart Glasses with Eye Tracking: The Optimal Front-End for AI Assistants

ABSTRACT

For AI assistants to provide relevant guidance, they must be aware of a user’s context, as perceived by the user. For humans, the visual system is the dominant sensory input, accounting of over 90% of our perception of the world; it is therefore not surprising that as humans, everything we do, we lead with our eyes. Importantly, our eyes only capture about 3% of our field of view in high resolution on a part of our retina called the fovea. 
Smart glasses are emerging as the ideal wearable for AI assistants because they are uniquely capable of sharing the “eyes and ears” of the user to provide contextual and perceptual awareness to the assistant. AI glasses with a world facing camera and microphones must therefore also include an eye tracker to deliver the most accurate facsimile of human perception. Furthermore, the eye is connected to 6 out of our 12 cranial nerves, and eye tracking can reveal a user’s fatigue, eye strain, cognitive load, and focus – adding important contextual information on the state of the user. 

MEMS technology has recently enabled the only eye tracker that can produce research-grade eye tracking data in a lightweight (<35g) pair of glasses that lasts all day on a charge. The MEMS solution delivers order-of-magnitude improvements across all key specifications, including power, weight, compute and sampling rate – all while matching the accuracy and precision of state-of-the-art systems.

This talk will include a high-level overview of the full-stack eye tracking solution and selected examples of real-world pain points that are addressed by wearables with AI assistance. In addition, the utility of all-day eye tracking to serve as a fitness tracker for eye and brain health will be discussed. Existing and emerging MEMS devices will play an important role in the growth of the wearables market in the years to come.

BIOGRAPHY

Neil Sarkar_AdHawk Microsystems
Neil Sarkar is the CEO and co-founder of AdHawk Microsystems, a deep tech company that has produced a full-stack eye tracking solution, from custom MEMS scanners to cloud-based analytics. The company has recently unveiled the MindLink Air, the first smart glasses that serve as a fitness tracker for eye and brain health. AdHawk’s MEMS-based eye tracker is also the only solution that is compatible with lightweight smart glasses with AI assistance features.
 
Neil has over 20 years of experience as a microsystem design engineer with a focus on ultra-precise mechatronic systems that reside on CMOS chips. This technology is used at AdHawk to create the world's first camera-free eye tracking microsystem that achieves order-of-magnitude improvements across all key metrics (power consumption, bandwidth, size, latency, ease-of-integration) when compared to conventional eye trackers.
 
Before AdHawk, Neil and his team commercialized the world's first single-chip Atomic Force Microscope at ICSPI Corp, a spinoff from the University of Waterloo that is enabling wafer-scale, nanometer resolution metrology. Dr. Sarkar is a PhD fellow of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology and the winner of the Douglas Colton Award for research excellence in microsystems.