Swedish company unveils first eye-controlled laptop

Swedish company Tobii unveiled Tuesday what it described as the world's first eye-controlled laptop, a prototype machine built with Lenovo where the focus is always at the place on the screen where the user is looking, dpa reported.

Tobii, based at Danderyd in Sweden, said it hoped the first production models from the Chinese company Lenovo would appear in two years.

Eye control works in conjunction with a keyboard and mouse to speed up computer use. Games are available which can be played with the eyes only. Texts can be made to automatically scroll upwards as the user reads them.

But most users rely on the hands to help. The prototype, demonstrated at the CeBIT expo in Hanover, Germany, allows the user to zoom in on part of an image just by looking at it and pressing a keyboard button.

A Tobii executive, Anders Olsson, said other conceivable uses included marking sections of text within an email which a user has already read, making it easier to resume reading later or to trackback to places in long text that have already been read.

Tobii already makes eye-controlled PCs for disabled people. The device is its first for the consumer mass market.