It’s not, perhaps, the world’s most pressing problem but it can be a pain nonetheless: there you are, watching a film on a plane when sleep overcomes you; when you wake up an hour later you have no idea where you were in the movie.
Now a solution may be near: PHYS.org reports that at the recent Paris Air Show French manufacturer Thales showed off a prototype for a new seat that can use iris-tracking to tell when you nod off. It can then pause your film and go into standby, all ready for you post-40 winks.
“The eye-tracking technology actually came from the handicapped market, and we’ve reapplied it to airlines,” Brett Bleacher, director of innovations for Thales, told PHYS.org.
Sadly, though, it looks like being five to ten years before the technology hits our planes. And even then, it will only be business class, meaning the rest of us cattle will have to continue pretending we didn’t want to watch the film anyway.
@thalesgroup