Full-time wearable headphone gaze detector presented by DoCoMo

This is definitely not an Innovation! The general accepted definition of innovation is that it has to do with the introduction of new ideas (products) into the marketplace. At its best this is an invention, and for it to turn into an innovation somebody needs to come up with pretty good ideas for commercial and/or social communication utilization. When NTT DoCoMo invented the Finger Whisper, many also thought that it would turn into an innovation. Whereas, not many believed that SMS would turn into one of the major commercial and communication success stories in mobile phone history. By the way one of the major drawbacks with the Finger Whisper was the fact that it had no keyboard, making it impossible to send SMS.

@John: why do we want this as streetware? Besides from the fact that we at one point will be able to make it?
@Morten: It seems to me then that innovation equals products (that are profitable)? I think of innovation as a process that can take place within different domains: biological, geographical, cultural, social, economic and so on.

Great. Another advertising medium. Cant wait till I can look at a Publix sign and hear about baked ham half off if you buy 2 packs of gum.

Neat work though, I wont overlook that.

@Søren. You might have a point. In my opinion an innovation don’t necessarily have to be profitable, however, it has to be taken into use e.g. make a difference to people/users… - properly it twill therefore also lead to a profit for somebody at sometime

This is the Godsend for any who work in the UI fields. Being able to track a users eye motion while using your product (any product - hardward, software, print media, sculpture, etc.) will allow a UI to be refined in a useability study before a product goes to market. While some of these already exist with mirrors (as mentioned), they’re so expensive and inexcessable that they’re not available to anyone outside a university HCI lab. Good design is big money (think Apple) so their is definitely a market for this.

Aha: @all: I think Anne Galloway put it nicely, that we:

“need to be clear on, and be able to justify, what it is about the mundane nature of everyday life that can be ‘improved’ through augmentation, amplification or attempts to merge the physical and the virtual - especially if the technologies themselves are expected to become ordinary and pervasive aspects of everyday life”

…if technology developers have recourse to this kind of accountability, they are in the green, - however, mostly it’s the case that technologies are in seach of a problem and creates (discursively or in market terms) a problem that can be conveniently solved with a technology…

Are you kidding me, you can’t see a single use for this? You can’t see someone paying thousands for a more advanced device that enables you to focus on somebody and via facial recognition or a spoken name have it pull up a full database of information on that person and have it display on your occular lens or have it read back to you. I’m in sales and I have a horrible memory, I’ve been imagining this device for some time now. Thanks to Hiroyuki’s work, my dream is this much closer. Users would pay more for greater levels of access to information like medical records, etc. Even cooler is receiving residuals from those payments when someone accesses your data and being able to see who has accessed that data (which you would pay to access and they would receive a payment - doh!) This rocks!