Eye-Control Technology by HONOR Revolutionizes Smartphone Experience

HONOR now allows users to control cars solely through eye movements. This breakthrough is made possible by the eye-tracking technology in the newly launched HONOR Magic 6 Pro smartphone. Eye-tracking in smartphones is not a new concept. As early as 2013, Samsung introduced the Smart Scroll feature in the Galaxy S4. With eye-tracking, users could simply look at the top or bottom of the phone to scroll up or down a page. While it worked surprisingly well, it wasn’t widely embraced as using fingers was faster and easier. Eventually, Samsung abandoned Smart Scroll.

However, a lot has changed in eleven years, and HONOR is ready to give eye-tracking another chance. In the Chinese version of the HONOR Magic 6 Pro, the eye-tracking feature now allows people to unfold and open notifications by gazing at them. This requires more finesse than what smart scrolling could offer, and this finesse is achieved through the device’s built-in artificial intelligence processing. To track eye movements, this phone uses a front-facing 3D sensor located within the pill-shaped display cutout. To set it up, you need to calibrate the phone so it knows where your eyes are and how your eye movements work. This calibration takes just a few seconds.

HONOR has developed a simple application for this demonstration. The app includes four buttons to control four actions, with sufficient space between each button to prevent confusion in eye-tracking. If you’re concerned about the security of any data obtained from eye-tracking, HONOR assures that they take this issue very seriously. All eye-tracking data is kept on the device itself, not stored in the cloud, and no selfie camera is used for tracking, ensuring that full pictures of your eyes are never involved. In a way, it’s not much different from the fingerprint scanner on your phone.

But the question remains: why is HONOR doing this? After all, no one will be driving a car using only eye movements in the near future. While that is a fact, the idea of interacting with technology using eye movements is a valid concept. For example, if you have your phone on the kitchen counter while cooking, moving through a recipe with your eyes could be very convenient. HONOR mentioned that the global version of the Magic 6 Pro will receive eye-tracking functionality sometime this year. It also hinted at the possibility of it appearing on last year’s Magic 5 Pro. The device has the hardware required to enable this feature, so it’s only a matter of HONOR making the effort to achieve this goal.