ChromeOS is getting an AI-powered accessibility feature that enables you to control the mouse and keyboard of your Chromebook with your facial movements. This accessibility feature will reportedly be available under the cursor and touchpad settings.
While the device in front of you tracking your face might not seem comfortable, this might also result in an improved user experience for certain cases. Like if your hands are temporarily busy, you can still operate your Chromebook by controlling the mouse and keyboard hands free.
Additionally, this feature allows people with physical impairments to use a Chromebook with a lot more ease going forward.
Is face tracking for Chromebook the successor of voice control?
There’s an accessibility tool named ChromeVox for your Chromebook that allows you to navigate through the OS using your voice. This works by assigning a number to each element on the screen. You select the elements by speaking the respective numbers, essentially replacing the mouse or keyboard with your voice. Now, there are facial controls in the works for ChromeOS.
However, there are likely to be some challenges in implementing facial controls on a Chromebook. You may have already seen controls like this in the Apple Vision Pro. This Apple device is equipped with various sensors that collect data to create a precise 3D map of your surroundings and track your eyes to determine where you’re looking.
This task is more challenging for a Chromebook, which typically only has a single, below-average camera. It would be difficult for the system to determine which part of the screen (or which element) you’re looking at based on the data it receives from the camera.
Nevertheless, there’s no official word from Google on how this would work. According to Chromeunboxed, this feature has already been implemented in ChromeOS version 120, but it’s currently not functional. So, we will have to wait for further development to see how precise the tracking can become.