Patent: The return of eye-controlled focus, but for mirrorless cameras

BakaBokeh · Feb 18, 2021

Done well, auto-focusing on what you look at could be an awesome feature.

Sporgon · Feb 18, 2021

BakaBokeh said:
Done well, auto-focusing on what you look at could be an awesome feature.

Damn that could take some explaining to my wife if I’m taking holiday snaps on the beach

masterpix · Feb 18, 2021

As an optional mechanism to pick AF points that would be amazing feature. Allowing the option to track moving objects in the EVF.

snapshot · Feb 18, 2021

in my experience with the elan 7e which had 7 autofocus zones and the 5d2 i replaced it with that had 9 autofocus points in a diamond, i could use the 5d2's joy stick to get the focus point just as fast, and more reliably than the eye controlled focus thing.

bluezurich · Feb 18, 2021

Ironically, it worked better on my EOS 5 than on my 3, other than that the 3 was the far better camera body. My favorite film camera. Must have been the close spacing of the AF points.

eosbob · Feb 18, 2021

I had an Elan IIE when it came out and the Eye controlled focus worked like a dream. Hard to believe that 25 years ago Canon had that and never really continued with it.

EOS ELAN II / EOS ELAN IIE - Canon Camera Museum

Here, you can find out about Canon's Film Cameras > EOS > EOS ELAN II / EOS ELAN IIE, EOS 50 / EOS 50E.

global.canon

Berowne · Feb 18, 2021

I always wondered, if eye-controlled AF is save and could not cause any damage to the retina.

rgb · Feb 18, 2021

R7 with Eye controll would be great, i loved it on my eos 5

KeithBreazeal · Feb 18, 2021

I wonder how well it would work for eyeglass wearers.

amorse · Feb 18, 2021

Really interesting. I never had the pleasure of using the system previously, but it sounds like there are some mixed reviews on past iterations of the system based on comments in here?

I wonder if there could be some really great synergies with the current eye detection systems in mirrorless bodies already. For instance, a modern eye-tracking system may not need to be used for selection of a specific autofocus point, but rather subject selection. If you're photographing a crowded space with lots of people in it (i.e. maybe a sports field or a street filled with people and lots of faces), I could see a ton of value if you only had to look at the subject you're after and the camera would find that subject's eye/face. That could make switching subjects real fast, one would think.

Neat!

Kit. · Feb 18, 2021

The camera on the drawing clearly has a mirror.

And yes, I had an Elan IIE (still probably have it lying somewhere), and its eye autofocus did not work reliably with my eyes.

miketcool · Feb 18, 2021

It still works like magic on my EOS 3. I’d love to have this on a mirrorless camera.

Joules · Feb 18, 2021

Kit. said:
The camera on the drawing clearly has a mirror.

And yes, I had an Elan IIE (still probably have it lying somewhere), and its eye autofocus did not work reliably with my eyes.

If you mean the diagonal labeled 15, that's a beam splitter, making it possible for the user to look at the EVF and a camera to look at the user's eye. This is not a DSLR body. But sure, it is not strictly speaking mirrorless, if that was your point.

Joules · Feb 18, 2021

So they light up your eye with infrared LEDs and take a picture of it using a small dual pixel AF sensor in the top of the EVF.

They seem to go way deeper than just AF control with this. The patents talks about identifiying different users based on their iris signature and saving user specific subject preferences. If I understand it correctly, you and your partner could share a body. When one of you prefers taking pictures of flowers, flowers will be recognized as the most likely subject in a scene when this user operates the camera, and if the other user prefers birds for example, those will be their default subjects. Which also implies that the bodies will have greater subject recognition capabilities in the first place.

Wasn't there a thread just a while back about people wishing for more security on their devices? Seems like with essentially an iris scanner built into the EVF, that might be another application they could look at since they process that information anyway.

usern4cr · Feb 18, 2021

In a recent vote in Scotland whether this will be the future AF technology or not, the "Eyes" have it!

Del Paso · Feb 18, 2021

Sporgon said:
Damn that could take some explaining to my wife if I’m taking holiday snaps on the beach

With some photographers, It would work like a kind of opto-electronic "booby"-trap

stochasticmotions · Feb 18, 2021

Would love to see this technology updated to the same extent that autofocus tracking has improved over the years. I still have the Elan 7E as my last Canon film camera, it was pretty good tech for the time...not perfect but it did work.

becceric · Feb 19, 2021

While I enjoyed using my Elan IIe, the eye controlled focus did not enjoy my rather thick eyeglasses. Still a great camera though.

Chig · Feb 19, 2021

I have an EOS 30v (Elan 7NE/7S) which is my favourite film camera and the last film camera Canon ever made (2003)
It works well including the eye controlled focus (for me anyway) and I found this feature works best if you use a large eye cup which holds your eye in a fixed position such as Hoodman's (which are also much more comfortable than the awful standard ones)
I believe people with low contrast irises had poor results though.
Just imagine how well it could work today especially in combination with DPAF ii and using the initial selection by your eyes followed by the automated eye tracking.
Great security feature too which could unlock your camera at the start of each session
Really hope this is included on the R7