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We were expecting \u2014 and we got \u2014 a lot of talk about generative AI this morning when Honor CEO George Zhao took the stage at Qualcomm\u2019s 2023 Snapdragon Summit. But the announcement of its Honor 6 flagship came with a surprising detail: it includes a feature that lets you interact with the device using your eyes. With some notable concerns about privacy implications, it looks kinda cool.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The keynote briefly featured a rendering of what this technology will look like, showing a woman looking at her phone with a snippet of the Uber app running at the top of the screen \u2014 something like a Live Activity<\/a>. By changing the direction of her gaze, she opens the app in full.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Honor calls the technology Magic Capsule, and describes it as \u201ceye-tracking based multimodal interaction,\u201d which is more descriptive but less fanciful than Magic Capsule. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s one feature on the upcoming Magic 6 that will also feature a virtual assistant that utilizes Qualcomm\u2019s on-device AI<\/a>. You can ask it to do things like gather all the videos on your device that meet a certain criteria, whittle them down by other characteristics, and have it generate a new video highlighting your clips. We\u2019re going to see a lot more of that kind of thing in the near future, too, because this year\u2019s Snapdragon Summit is All About AI. We were 15 minutes into the main keynote before 5G was even uttered once, for the record.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Whether \u2014 and how \u2014 Magic Capsule works<\/em> is a question mark. The demo video is hardly a real-life representation, <\/strong>and it seems like a feature with the potential to introduce more frustration than it\u2019s worth. The \u201cmulti-modal\u201d descriptor seems to indicate that gaze is just one input in the system, so it could be coupled with other gestures to work reliably \u2014perhaps like how we\u2019ve seen PSVR 2 games use eye-tracking<\/a> to highlight things before you click to confirm. Also: <\/strong>do you want<\/em> your phone to know where you\u2019re looking? It\u2019s no small issue when you\u2019re talking about a state-backed company like Honor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n All of that aside, it\u2019s nice to see device OEMs pushing for advances in how we use our phones that don\u2019t begin and end with an AI chatbot. Reliable eye-tracking technology would have some real accessibility benefits, and it\u2019s not entirely out of left field<\/a>. <\/strong>It could be handy for moments when your hands are full \u2014 Apple certainly seems to think there\u2019s a need for new ways of controlling your devices<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n