You Can Control Honor’s New Phone With Your Eyes

Chinese phone maker Honor took the stage at the recent Qualcomm 2023 Snapdragon Summit to announce its latest flagship, the Magic 6. There was a lot of talk about AI at this event, but one feature that stood out was the ability to control the phone with just your eyes.

During the keynote, a glimpse of this technology was presented through a rendering. It depicted a woman using her phone, showcasing a portion of the Uber app running at the screen’s top – akin to a Live Activity. By altering the direction of her gaze, she was effortlessly able to expand the app to full screen.

Referred to as “Magic Capsule” by Honor, this technology is described as “eye-tracking based multimodal interaction,” which is a more precise but less fanciful term than “Magic Capsule.”

The forthcoming Magic 6 will introduce this feature along with a virtual assistant leveraging Qualcomm’s on-device AI. This virtual assistant can perform tasks such as curating videos on your device based on specific criteria, refining them according to other attributes, and generating a new video highlighting your selected clips.

It remains to be seen how this feature actually works since the demo video is not a real-life representation. It also seems more of a show-off feature rather than a practical one with any real use cases. Most of us also don’t want our phones to know where we’re looking.

Perhaps eye tracking would be useful when your hands are busy or maybe it’s meant for handicapped people.

Either way, the term “multi-modal” suggests that gaze tracking is just one component of the system, and it may be combined with other gestures to ensure reliable operation. This means it could be similar to PSVR 2 games, where eye-tracking is employed to highlight objects before you click to confirm.

While Honor has not provided a specific release date for the Magic 6, Qualcomm has indicated that phones featuring its latest flagship chipset will begin to appear in the coming weeks.