The Honor Magic 6 will allow you to open apps together with your eyes

We had been anticipating — and we obtained — a number of speak about generative AI this morning when Honor CEO George Zhao took the stage at Qualcomm’s 2023 Snapdragon Summit. However the announcement of its Honor 6 flagship got here with a shocking element: it features a characteristic that allows you to work together with the gadget utilizing your eyes. With some notable considerations about privateness implications, it seems to be kinda cool.

The keynote briefly featured a rendering of what this expertise will appear like, displaying a lady her cellphone with a snippet of the Uber app working on the high of the display — one thing like a Dwell Exercise. By altering the course of her gaze, she opens the app in full.

Honor calls the expertise Magic Capsule, and describes it as “eye-tracking primarily based multimodal interplay,” which is extra descriptive however much less fanciful than Magic Capsule.

What in case your cellphone simply did your bidding primarily based in your gaze? That will rule. Picture: Honor

It’s one characteristic on the upcoming Magic 6 that may even characteristic a digital assistant that makes use of Qualcomm’s on-device AI. You may ask it to do issues like collect all of the movies in your gadget that meet a sure standards, whittle them down by different traits, and have it generate a brand new video highlighting your clips. We’re going to see much more of that type of factor within the close to future, too, as a result of this 12 months’s Snapdragon Summit is All About AI. We had been quarter-hour into the primary keynote earlier than 5G was even uttered as soon as, for the report.

Whether or not — and the way — Magic Capsule works is a query mark. The demo video is hardly a real-life illustration, and it looks like a characteristic with the potential to introduce extra frustration than it’s price. The “multi-modal” descriptor appears to point that gaze is only one enter within the system, so it may very well be coupled with different gestures to work reliably —maybe like how we’ve seen PSVR 2 video games use eye-tracking to spotlight issues earlier than you click on to substantiate. Additionally: would you like your cellphone to know the place you’re wanting? It’s no small situation once you’re speaking a few state-backed firm like Honor.

All of that apart, it’s good to see gadget OEMs pushing for advances in how we use our telephones that don’t start and finish with an AI chatbot. Dependable eye-tracking expertise would have some actual accessibility advantages, and it’s not completely out of left subject. It may very well be useful for moments when your fingers are full — Apple definitely appears to assume there’s a necessity for brand spanking new methods of controlling your units.

Honor hasn’t mentioned particularly when the Magic 6 will ship, however Qualcomm says that telephones with its new flagship chipset will begin arriving within the coming weeks.