Controlling a computer with a mouse might seem like second nature to you, but to people with motor control issues or other disabilities preventing them from keeping a steady hand on a peripheral, it can be a frustrating endeavor. That’s why Google’s giving Chromebook users the ability to control their cursors with their faces.
Initially announced in December, Face Control allows Chromebooks to use your webcam and facial gestures as input. Look down to move your cursor down to your menu, or look up and to the left to hover over the Compose button in Gmail. Move your mouth left or right to left-click or right-click, and open your mouth to start using voice-to-text.
Assuming there are no hiccups, the tool should allow for entirely hands-free control, intended to aid with accessibility. According to Google, this is another AI-powered feature, and “uses a series of machine learning models” to generate a 3D mesh of your face with 478 specific facial points for fine control.
There’s a small catch, in that Google recommends 8GB of RAM for the best performance, but now that the feature’s out of beta, you’re free to try it for yourself and test it out. Google says it’s rolling out to all users now, alongside features to access reading mode in the Chrome browser with more natural voices, plus use a screen reader in “previously inaccessible PDFs.”
On the more fun side of things, Face Control is actually fairly similar to Project Gameface, a similar tool Google developed for Windows and Android that allows gamers to control titles like World of Warcraft by mapping facial gestures to in-game actions.
Unfortunately, while Project Gameface is open-source, allowing developers to tweak the tool and add support for it as they wish, Face Control is limited to ChromeOS for now. To turn it on once it rolls out to you, find it under the Accessibility menu at Settings > Accessibility.