Recently, the team of Professor Zhenhua Ni, Professor Junpeng Lu, and Associate Research Fellow Wenhui Wang at Southeast University made progress in novel detectors and eye tracking. Their work, entitled “Ultrasensitive Mesh-Structured Position-Sensitive Detectors Enabling Eye Tracking for Human-Machine Interaction,” was published in Advanced Materials.
Eye tracking reveals user attention and intention by measuring eye movements, providing an efficient and intuitive route for human–machine interaction. However, although mainstream video-based eye-tracking systems can achieve sub-degree accuracy, they inevitably require the acquisition and processing of large amounts of redundant pixel data, resulting in high power consumption. An ideal eye-tracking system should simultaneously deliver high tracking frequency, high precision, and low power consumption, yet existing technologies have struggled to satisfy all three requirements at once. To address this challenge, the team proposed and developed a graphene photoconductive mesh-structured position-sensitive detector (PSD)and successfully constructed a highly efficient, energy-saving eye-tracking system.
To realize highly sensitive position detection under weak light, the researchers exploited the synergistic effects of the lateral photoelectric effect and interfacial gating, enabling the mesh-structured PSD to operate under eye-safe ultra-weak light as low as 10 pW, without a detection dead zone. During operation, the system requires only four readout signals. Compared with video-based systems, this reduces the data volume by more than three orders of magnitude while still achieving extremely high precision. Leveraging the PSD’s real-time and precise tracking capability, the system determines gaze orientation by tracking the reflected trajectory of a light beam from the cornea, achieving a tracking frequency of up to 1 kHz and an angular accuracy of better than 0.1°. Furthermore, by integrating the system into a glasses prototype, the team successfully demonstrated human–machine interaction scenarios including eye-controlled typing and the Gluttonous Snake game. This work not only breaks the conventional trade-off between performance and power consumption in eye-tracking technologies, but also provides broad prospects and theoretical support for future human–machine interaction applications in miniaturized systems and wearable devices.
Southeast University is the sole corresponding institution for this work. Professor Zhenhua Ni and Professor Junpeng Lu from the School of Electronic Science & Engineering and the School of Physics, together with Associate Research Fellow Wenhui Wang from the School of Physics, all at Southeast University, are the co-corresponding authors. PhD candidate Peiyu Zeng from the School of Physics is the first author.
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Major Science and Technology Special Project of Jiangsu Province, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, and theStart-up Research Fund of Southeast University.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202521363
