GazeTags is a camera-free approach for head-gaze object awareness. Our small tags cost ~$2 each and can operate for more than a year on a coin cell battery. They work in concert with a user-worn device (e.g., smartglasses, hearables) that periodically emits a focused infrared signal aligned with the user’s head direction. Only GazeTags within that narrow head-oriented beam respond with their identity and optional payloads such as object state or live sensor readings. By avoiding cameras and computer vision pipelines, our approach is very energy efficient, able to operate continuously even in battery-constrained wearables, and sidesteps non-trivial privacy issues.
Published at ACM UIST 2026.