Henry Ford once said, “If you’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.” The authenticity of the quote is not confirmed 100%, but the point is clear: people can’t always find the best solutions to their problems.
But there is another popular quote: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”, which translates to “the voice of the people is the voice of God”. ZTE liked this better and in 2016 announced the start of Project CSX.
The goal was simple, form a new online “Z-Community” that will help design a smartphone by suggesting cool features and then voting for them. The rules were perfectly reasonable:
- Must be a mobile product (note: not necessarily a smartphone)
- Technologically, it must be realistic for 2017
- The final product must be accessible to the general population
So ZTE let people’s imaginations fly. The first phase was the collection of ideas: around 400 ideas were submitted, of which 100 were rejected because they didn’t fit at all.
The second phase was the voting phase, which began at IFA 2016. The top 3 suggestions would progress to the next phase, forming “hack teams” to build prototypes. The winning prototype was to be presented at CES.
ZTE Hawkeye (prototype)
January 2017 arrived, and Project CSX officially entered its next phase: The phone was officially named the “Hawkeye” and launched a Kickstarter campaign seeking to raise $500,000 within 44 days so production could begin. Fans could back the campaign for $200 and get one of the phones they helped design, scheduled to ship in September.
Well, what was the killer feature of ZTE Hawkeye? Eye tracking. The phone had to have a high-resolution front-facing camera that tracked the user’s gaze and triggered context-sensitive actions. Here is the official promo video:
The gist is that you can scroll through web pages without touching your phone. This also worked in the gallery, allowing you to “scroll” through the photos with your eyes. A few other things have been mentioned like checking Google Maps with your gaze.
Some of you may be thinking “didn’t the 2013 Galaxy S4 do that?” He did it, it was called Smart Scroll. This involved tilting your head instead of just looking at the edge of the screen, but it was pretty much the same thing.
The Galaxy S4 introduced Smart Scroll and related features
The S4 had other Smart features in its toolbox. Smart Pause may automatically pause a video when you look away. Smart Stay (first launched on the S III) prevented the screen from freezing while you were looking at it. Smart Rotate used the relative orientation of your face rather than the accelerometer to rotate the screen. And that was on top of all the features of hand waving.
There’s something about this idea that sounds so cool during the design stage, but then users completely ignore it when they’re granted access. The Amazon Fire Phone had four cameras on the front for accurate face tracking and could render compelling 3D effects. Well, we all know how that went. Google crammed a radar into Pixel 4 phones (Project Soli) because it thought the cool hands-free gestures would be a hit too (spoiler: they weren’t).
There was one more thing, the phone would have a case that could stick to smooth surfaces. This would allow you to attach Hawkeye to the wall and use the eye tracking feature to control it.
So what happened with Hawkeye? By the end of January it was clear that things weren’t going well. The campaign grossed just $36,245, less than 10% of the goal. People are simply not impressed with the specs of the device.
The company has tried to reorganize itself. He said he will either update the specs or remove the Kickstarter campaign entirely and replace it with a better device. Better how? ZTE kept the spirit of the project alive and asked people to vote on what to do:
- Replacing the Qualcomm 625 with the 835?
- Replace the 3000mAh battery with a 3500mAh one?
- Would the OS be Stock Android with added eye tracking software?
The company was also open to other suggestions. Within days of this poll going up, just under 100 people had voted – that doesn’t sound like much but it was around half the number of supporters.
Ultimately, there was no satisfactory plan and the company made the decision to cancel the campaign in February 2017. The project itself was not finished, the company wanted to continue exploring these ideas, but Hawkeye would never see the light of the day.
ZTE made a mistake in choosing relatively low-end hardware for Hawkeye and admitted it. But considering that the offer to move to a much more powerful chipset didn’t appeal to people, it goes to show that perhaps the whole eye-tracking idea just wasn’t viable.
And in hindsight we know that many similar ideas have failed to catch on. For example, the Galaxy S23 lacks Smart Scroll, which was abandoned generations ago. The CSX project was a cool idea and hats off to ZTE who was really willing to listen to the fans. Unfortunately, some things look a lot cooler than they are, and controlling your phone with eye tracking is one of those things.
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