The smartphone market is a battlefield, where all brands claim to have the best devices (or at least that’s what they try to convince us). That’s why it’s logical for companies to introduce distinctive features, like the one from Honor today.
We expected a lot of talk about generative AI this morning when Honor CEO, George Zhao, took the stage at the Qualcomm Snapdragon 2023 Summit.
What we didn’t expect was the announcement that their flagship, the Honor 6, would come with a surprising feature: it includes a function that allows interaction with the device using your eyes. It sounds pretty cool (if privacy isn’t a concern). Here’s the Honor Magic 5 Pro from earlier this year.
Don’t touch the screen, just look
In the keynote, a brief demonstration was shown of how this technology will work. It depicted a woman looking at her phone with a snippet of the Uber app running at the top of the screen, akin to a live activity.
By changing the direction of her gaze, the full app opens. Honor refers to this technology as Magic Capsule, describing it as “eye-tracking-based multimodal interaction,” which is more descriptive but less fanciful than Magic Capsule.
This feature is part of the upcoming Magic 6, which will also feature a virtual assistant utilizing Qualcomm’s AI on the device. You can ask it to do things like gather all the videos on your device that meet specific criteria, refine them by other features, and have it generate a new video with your clips.
We’re likely to see many more developments like this in the near future because this year’s Snapdragon Summit revolves around AI. 5G is a thing of the past; now, it’s all about AI.
Whether Magic Capsule truly works and how it functions remain uncertain. The demo video isn’t a real-world representation, and it seems like a feature that could generate more frustration than utility.
It’s reassuring to see original equipment manufacturers driving advancements in how we use our phones that don’t just begin and end with an AI chatbot.
Reliable eye-tracking technology could offer real accessibility advantages and isn’t entirely out of place. It could be useful for moments when your hands are occupied. Honor hasn’t specified when the Magic 6 will be available.
