I am hoping for an eye-tracking mouse solution in the meantime, where looking at a portion of the screen and pressing a key on the keyboard will click rather than having to move a hand away from the keyboard to use a mouse, or wait for the analog stick mouse to reach the right point of the screen. Seems to be getting more plausible but still fairly expensive for a few years yet.
You've unlocked a memory. Probably 10-15 years ago, I tried a bunch of eye tracking apps and found one that somehow worked really well with my cheap USB webcam. I'm sure it needed to be calibrated first. It was classic developer software, snappy with bare-bones UI. Freeware, ran on Windows 2000, not sure if open source.
I wonder if I have it backed up or could track down what it was again. I was not much of a developer then, but these days it would be simple to wire up simulated mouse events.
I've built something similar along these lines. It's an app that uses your camera to track hand movement. As you move your hand through the air your cursor moves as well and to click you need to show a simple hand gesture.
My experience with eye trackers was similar. The clicking thing is partially solvable with eye tracker + foot pedal combination, but the biggest turn off with eye tracker was poor support for wider monitors or multiple monitor setup. Eye trackers also require you to be in a certain distance from it which was affecting my posture.
These were some of the reasons why I've built Cursorly https://cursorly.app/
It's still in the early stage but I'd love to hear some feedback. There is a free trial for a few days, but let me know if you want to extended it, I'd be happy to do so.
I would say that an eye tracking mouse is what OptiKey has, and for Talon it's more of an eye tracking+head pointing+voice clicking mouse. If you have tmj/vocal cords/neck problems you won't be able to use eye tracker as a mouse replacement.
> for Talon it's more of an eye tracking+head pointing+voice clicking mouse
> If you have tmj/vocal cords/neck problems you won't be able to use eye tracker as a mouse replacement.
I disagree with these assertions. There are several options in Talon for eye tracking. Optikey is a nice suite of functionality, but it's Windows-only, while Talon is cross platform. I also have a few users who use the Optikey UI but prefer to use Talon's eye tracking to control it. I've certainly recommended Optikey to users.
The updated direct control mouse mode in Talon 0.3 can be used without any head tracking at all as long as your targets aren't too small.
The zoom mode explicitly uses no head tracking as well.
To click or trigger the zoom mouse, you can make a pop noise, use voice commands, or a physical mouse button, or keyboard, or any keyboard emulating input device (such as a foot pedal), or use one of the dwell options.
