Crackful thinking: multiple monitors and auto focus

// August 15th, 2010 // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

I don’t very often use multiple monitors, but when I do it always takes a while for my head to come to terms with how focus works. I’ll do something in a window on one monitor and then look at the other monitor and start typing before realising that the window in the first monitor still has focus.

It would be a cool hack if my head could be tracked to figure out which monitor I’m looking at and focus the last active window displayed on it.

I have a webcam integrated into the display of my laptop and the Monitors tool knows where my screens physically are, so some of the parts would be.

I don’t know what you’d do in the case that a window is displayed on both screens at once and it would be annoying in the case that you want to type into a window on monitor 2 whilst looking at monitor 1.

2 Responses to “Crackful thinking: multiple monitors and auto focus”

  1. Nick says:
    16/08/2010 at 05:34

    Having something like the TrackIR system[1] do something like this would be very cool, though I haven’t seen if there’s anything available to do this for a desktop environment. These hardware were designed for games, especially flight and racing sims, with a few FPS support. Here’s some videos that show off the hardware and what they could do in games:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AO0F5sLdVM
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wXx3vMy_AQ
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5-wRIa9GDg

    I could imagine using this hardware to track focus of windows on the existing screen. Alternately, I could see using your head motions to move the viewpoint across a larger workspace, or move around some 3D workspace.

    There are several projects that are using webcams for a similar system as the Track IR for games, I haven’t heard of any desktop integration for them yet.

    1 – http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/

    Reply
  2. Philip Peitsch says:
    16/08/2010 at 10:42

    I can recommend turning on mouse-focus following. There is an X setting (Preferences > Windows or something on Ubuntu) to make the selected window change based on the mouse location. Though head-pointing would be way more awesome, I found that tracking the mouse movement without needing to click on the window to focus it made a huge improvement for me.

    Now I only wish I could get my windows install to do that…

    Reply

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