It starts with iGaze: visual attention driven networking with smart glasses

Abstract

In this work, we explore a new networking mechanism with smart glasses, through which users can express their interest and connect to a target simply by a gaze. Doing this, we attempt to let wearable devices understand human attention and intention, and pair devices carried by users according to such attention and intention. To achieve this ambitious goal, we propose a proof-of-concept system iGaze, a visual attention driven networking suite: an iGaze glass (hardware), and a networking protocol VAN (software). Our glass, iGaze glass, is a low-cost head-mounted glass with a camera, orientation sensors, microphone and speakers, which are embedded with our software for visual attention capture and networking. A visual attention driven networking protocol (VAN) is carefully designed and implemented. In VAN, we design an energy efficient and highly accurate visual attention determination scheme using single camera to capture user's communication interest and a double-matching scheme based on visual direction detection and Doppler effect of acoustic signal to lock the target devices. Using our system, we conduct a series of trials for various application scenarios to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.