Your Honor Has a New Magical Feature

One unexpected feature of the Honor 6 flagship is that it allows you to interact with the smartphone using your eyes. It appears somewhat interesting, despite some noteworthy privacy consequences.

A brief demonstration of the technology was shown during the keynote. A woman gave a demonstration using her phone while a Live Activity-like portion of the Uber app was running at the top of the screen. She shifts the direction of her gaze to fully open the app.

Honor refers to the technology as Magic Capsule, but in a less magical description of the feature, they call it “eye-tracking based multimodal interaction.”

The main function of the upcoming Magic 6 will also include an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistant from Qualcomm. You could instruct it to perform tasks such as compiling all of the videos on your device that fit a specific description, selecting them based on additional features, and producing a fresh video that features your clips.

Whether — and how — Magic Capsule works is a question mark. The demo video is hardly a real-life representation, and it seems like a feature with the potential to introduce more frustration than it’s worth. The “multi-modal” descriptor seems to indicate that gaze is just one input in the system, so it could be coupled with other gestures to work reliably —perhaps like how we’ve seen PSVR 2 games use eye-tracking to highlight things before you click to confirm.

The question is, do you want your phone to know where you are looking?

 It’s no small issue when you’re talking about a state-backed company like Honor.

So how about keeping the extravagant idea of the “magic capsule” but shifting the concept to individuals with differing abilities? The magic capsule could be a feature embedded in every single Honor device other than their smartphones but also in their tablets, laptops, and smart home devices.

The features target audience could be people with locked-in-syndrome, severe quadriplegia, and advanced stages of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis also known as ALS. This will allow for communication between them and the people around. It could also aid as a form of entertainment, and the crucial point is to keep them feeling independent and alive.

The feature could go from one that proposes security measures to a feature that aids in the independence of individuals who face challenges.

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