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

We had been anticipating — and we acquired — a number of discuss 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 stunning element: it features a function that permits you to work together with the system utilizing your eyes. With some notable issues about privateness implications, it seems kinda cool.

The keynote briefly featured a rendering of what this expertise will appear to be, exhibiting a lady taking a look at her telephone with a snippet of the Uber app working on the high of the display — one thing like a Dwell Exercise. By altering the path 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.

It’s one function on the upcoming Magic 6 that may even function a digital assistant that makes use of Qualcomm’s on-device AI. You’ll be able to ask it to do issues like collect all of the movies in your system 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 form 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 principle keynote earlier than 5G was even uttered as soon as, for the document.

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 as if a function 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 focus on issues earlier than you click on to substantiate. Additionally: do you need your telephone to know the place you’re wanting? It’s no small situation if you’re speaking a couple of state-backed firm like Honor.

All of that apart, it’s good to see system 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 fully out of left discipline. It may very well be helpful for moments when your palms 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.