The Next Big Thing: Eyetracking, Face Reading or Augmented Reality?

It is never easy to guess which technology is going to be a soaraway success and which is going to sink without trace. The Future Parc at the CeBIT trade fair in Hanover is designed to showcase breakthrough technologies and the BBC Click Online team has been through its offerings and selected these bright ideas:

* Tobii Technology's eye catching mouse trap
This eye tracking system allows people with limited use of their hands to move a cursor around a computer screen just by looking at it.

* Fraunhofer's face finder
The Fraunhofer Institute, whose past bright ideas include MP3, have now come up with a system that can find a face in any light and then tell you if the face is male or female, happy or sad, surprised or angry.

* Novonic's eBlocker
With concerns that radio waves from mobile phones might be harmful to our health, the company Novonic has come up with the e-blocker: a fabric that blocks radio waves.

* Augmented Reality - where the virtual meets the real
Total Immersion has come up with a system that introduces digitally generated images into video of the real world in real time.

Associated Link: BBC Click: Technology's Next Big Thing

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