Students accustomed to staring at a blank computer screen may soon be able to surf the Internet and pull up documents with just their eyesight.

EyePoint -- a computer interaction technique created by Stanford University researchers -- allows people to point to objects on a screen by simply gazing where they would normally place the cursor of their computer mouse, said Manu Kumar, researcher and doctoral candidate at Stanford. To select the desired object, the user presses a key on the keyboard in place of clicking the mouse.

"If you look at how most people use their computers -- for surfing the Web, checking e-mail, the average user-type of task -- [they] don't need to rely on using a mouse all the time," Kumar said. "The mouse will still be around, [but] this is just another option for pointing and selecting on your screen."

Though previous research has identified gaze-based computer interaction as a way of using an alternative to the mouse, the EyePoint is the technique's first practical application, Kumar said.

During a 30-second calibration period, a dot is displayed in several positions on the computer screen while a camera records the user's eye movements, Kumar said. The recorded eye movements are processed to interpret what the user's eyes look like when looking at the screen in different directions in order for EyePoint to accurately identify the object the user wants to select on the screen.

In addition to EyePoint, other gazed-based techniques are also being developed, including techniques for page scrolling, password entry and switching between computer applications, Kumar said.

"[These techniques] are adding a lot of gaze-based interactions to your everyday computing experience," he said.

Craig Ganoe, senior research associate in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), said people may not be likely to use EyePoint because the current generations of eye trackers are expensive.

"As the prices of these technologies get lower and lower, you'll see more of them integrated [into computers]," Ganoe said.

The EyePoint is not meant to replace the mouse, Kumar said. Instead, EyePoint provides an alternative option for interacting with the computer, especially for those who suffer from repetitive strain injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome.

In addition to eye tracking, Ganoe said, other input techniques -- including speech, touch and gesture inputs -- may become more common.

"I think eventually we'll have multiple input technologies on computers, and eventually we'll find out what the best input technique is for [each] task," Ganoe said. "It wouldn't be that difficult to integrate the technology if someone wanted to put the time and money into it."

Kumar said he plans to further develop gaze-based techniques to improve accuracy. Other researchers in the Stanford research group intend to use the techniques to analyze how people process and understand visual information that is presented to them, he said, which could also have implications in the fields of medicine and psychology.

Eye-tracking technologies are "scientific applications," said Frank Ritter, associate professor of psychology and IST, and are mainly used for research to determine how people look at information.

"Eyes are the best window you have [into] what's going on inside the mind," Kumar said. "If you look at [eye movement], it gives you a lot more information about what people look at and then how they process the information."

But results from eye-tracking studies can be low-level and uninformative because they don't indicate the reason why a person looks at something, Ritter said. Eye trackers currently cost between $5,000 and $50,000, he said, which can limit their use to researchers and those who can afford them.

"Time will tell if it gets easy enough and physically robust enough and cheap enough, and [everyday people] can learn how to use it," Ritter said. "But scientists will continue to use it to understand human cognition."