Eye-tracking sensor maker makes play for big time
Eye-tracking sensor maker makes play for big time
By Helena Soderpalm | Reuters – 3 hours ago
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - An accidental breakthrough in a
Stockholm laboratory 15 years ago could reap a fortune for the engineers who
made it -- as long as they can win over some of the most demanding consumers:
video gamers.
Since John Elvesjo noticed a sensor tracking his eye
movements in a lab experiment, the technology he developed with Henrik
Eskilsson and Marten Skogo has helped disabled people use a computer by
identifying where they are looking on the screen.
The system uses invisible infra-red light to illuminate
the eyes. Camera sensors capture the reflection off the retina and cornea to
gauge where the eye is, and where it is looking.
The mass-market potential looks almost limitless.
Advertisers could adapt billboard images depending on where you rest your gaze.
A car could alert you when you're about to fall asleep. Eskilsson says eye
tracking will one day be found in all laptops, smartphones, tablets and
automobiles.
First up is the computer gaming hardware market. As a
player looks to one part of the screen, the image will pan across the landscape
and open up a new field of vision.
Whether it catches on in the fiercely competitive gaming
industry could depend on a deal struck this year between Eskilsson's company
Tobii and Ubisoft, maker of blockbuster game "Assassin's Creed:
Rogue".
Tracking the player's gaze, the eyes of warrior Shay
Patrick Cormac look across seascapes, forts and battlefields as he hunts
assassins in North America during the Seven Years War in the PC version of the
game.
The success of this and other tie-ins is the biggest test
yet for Tobii, which is making no revenue from supplying its technology for the
deal.
The aim is to get enough players interested to lure other
gaming companies for deals that would bring in revenue. So far it has a handful
of other tie-ins and Eskilsson said eye-tracking will have to reach at least 30
to 50 games before it can be regarded as mainstream.
The prize is huge: Tobii's sales ambitions suggest an
overall market for gaming eye-tracking sensors that could top $5 billion a year
in revenue, about six times the firm's market value.
"Eye-tracking makes it possible to create a more
human device," said Eskilsson at Tobii's Stockholm headquarters, his
laptop slipping into standby mode after noticing that he had looked away.
"Not only by steering with your eyes, but with
hands, voice and where you are looking. All put together."
SMARTPHONE HURDLES
The company faces further hurdles before it can break
into the far larger smartphone market.
Fund manager Inge Heydorn at Sentat Asset Management in
Stockholm compared Tobii's gaming-focused business to a hard-to-value stock
option and said its sensors must become cheaper and smaller and consume less
energy if they are to be used for smartphones packing far less battery power
than laptops.
"They don't know if they will get power consumption
down. We don't know. Nobody knows," said Heydorn, who holds no Tobii
stock.
Tobii dominates the market for now - its $75 million in
2014 sales is five times that of its closest rival among about 20 eye-tracking
technology firms - by selling sensors as disability aids and for behavioural
studies in research.
Keeping that edge may prove a challenge now that big
technology firms, some of them Tobii customers, are looking at whether to
develop their own technology.
South Korean giant Samsung's latest phone reads the
position of the user's face, something Eskilsson sees as a precursor to
full-blown eye tracking.
Tobii's deep-pocketed backers include Swedish group Investor,
with a 19 percent stake, Intel Capital and early Spotify investor Northzone,
both with roughly 8 percent.
Expectations for profit growth are sky-high and Tobii's
share price has almost tripled since its April listing. The company is
investing about 150 million Swedish crowns ($18 million) annually to expand in
PC gaming.
"It's going to take a couple of years for that to
become a volume market. It's not 10 years away, but within a couple of
years," said Eskilsson.
Hans Otterling at third-biggest shareholder Northzone
said Tobii was "totally capable" of carrying on by itself, without
being swallowed by a bigger company. He said its value lay in the range of
areas where eye-tracking may be applied.
"Imagine a surgeon, his hands free, able to steer
things with his eyes. There is really just your imagination setting the
limits," he said.
($1 = 8.3006 Swedish crowns; $1 = 0.9195 euros)
(Editing by Niklas Pollard, Tom Pfeiffer and Pravin Char)
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