Samsung Galaxy S4 to break new ground with eye tracking?

Is Samsung about to open up a new eye-tracking front in the battle for smartphone supremacy? If early reports are to be believed, that certainly looks – excuse the pun – to be the case.

The South Korean company’s Galaxy SIV phone, to be unveiled next week in New York, will be able to track where the user is looking, allowing for hands-free scrolling and control, according to the New York Times. If the user is reading a web page, for example, the phone will automatically scroll downward, following the person’s eyes.

Samsung isn’t yet talking about the possible feature, despite the newspaper citing a source within the company. The race is on to guess who or what is responsible for the underlying technology.

A good possibility is Israeli startup UMoove, which has 11 patents in this area. When I visited the company in Tel Aviv in October of last year, founder Moti Krispil showed off the technology on an iPad.

It worked well, especially with a game called Flees, from Ginormous Games. The simplistic game has the user controlling a pack of cartoonish fleas as they try to avoid obstacles rushing at them on a quickly scrolling screen. The current game, which is available now for iOS devices, is touch-controlled; in the Umoove version, the fleas move left and right depending on where the user is looking. Taking your eyes off the screen pauses the action.

Eye tracking to revolutionize wireless market?

But the game is only the tip of the iceberg. Eye tracking can be used to scroll through text or photos, which could be useful when two hands aren’t available – say, reading an ebook while holding a subway pole. It also has value for advertisers – knowing where users are looking would help with ad placement.

Krispil said the technology was just about ready for prime time and that it also worked on smartphones. It’s not resource intensive, using less than 1 per cent of a high-end phone’s processing power. Moreover, it’s purely software, meaning no special hardware needs to be built in to a device to use it – it simply makes use of a phone or tablet’s existing front-facing camera.

That would give Umoove a leg up with Samsung over other possible technology providers. The New York Times report mentioned Tobii, a Swedish startup that is also working on eye-tracking technology, as a potential contender. But at the past few Consumer Electronic Shows in Las Vegas, the company has demonstrated its product using PCs. At the 2012 CES, a spokesperson told me the technology was still a few years away from being affordable.

Umoove, for its part, isn’t talking. Krispil said in October that he had received investment from a strategic investor, but he didn’t respond to a request for comment this week.

Eye-tracking could turn out to be a gimmick, but it could also be an important development in the smartphone war. Samsung has powered ahead over the past few years to emerge as the only serious competitor to Apple, a company that has recently lost some of its luster. The focus in recent months has come down to which company is innovating more; many believe it’s Samsung and Android.

With both companies releasing new versions of their flagship phones on an annual basis, they’re now locked in a game of one-upsmanship. If Samsung does indeed make waves with eye tracking, Apple will be under pressure to top it. Could the iPhone 6 be thought-controlled?