VIDEO: A New Way To Drive -- Using Your EYES!

Consumer Reports...reports:

One lesson learned in high-performance driving schools, or even when you take lessons in sports like whitewater kayaking or downhill skiing, is to look where you want to go. You don’t look at the tree or rock you don’t want to hit. That’s because your car (or kayak, or skis) tends to go in the direction of your sight.

The Spirit of Berlin, a modified 2007 Dodge Grand Caravan, takes this concept to a whole different level: it uses the driver’s eye movement to actually steer the vehicle. Building on eye-tracking software (like that commonly used for driver distraction studies) and lessons learned in developing autonomous vehicles for DARPA and soccer-playing robots, Freie Universtität Berlin and SensoMotoric Instruments developed the EyeDriver software that controls the minivan. (It seems wrong that the Spirit of Berlin isn’t actually a German-branded car, but at least Daimler still owned Chrysler when this Caravan was built...