Eye-controlled ear-phones are here

Sometime soon, your hi-fi stereo set will obey your eye commands.

At the ongoing Mobile World Congress, NTT Docomo is demonstrating a technology that allows a person to raise or reduce music volume, change track or stop the music altogether by just rolling his eyes.

All you need to do is to plug in regular looking ear-phones. The gentleman pictured above held exhibition visitors spell bound by rolling his eyes right twice to move the player to the next track and left twice to return to the previous track.

It seemed like pure magic, but it is science. The NTT Docomo explained there are negative and positive electrodes in between the two eyes. The ear phone may look regular. It is not. It is capable of detecting and measuring the levels of electrodes in the wearer’s head. It then transfers it to a processor which interprets them. A graph on display moved left when the gentleman looked left and right when the man turns his eyes in that direction. Each of these eye movements is preset with a stereo function: change track, reduce volume, increase volume etc.

The technology is still a prototype. But now that it is already on demo, it is closer to commercialisation than ever. The possibilities are enormous. Just imagine flicking through TV channels without lifting a finger.

The only flip side here is that women who love to roll their eyes for no reason may never be able to play a single track to its logical end!