Sunglasses that can detect when someone is making eye contact with the wearer could be used to tell when someone might be too busy to receive a phone call and for automatically detecting and recording interactions and conversations with other people.

Light emitting diodes positioned around the lenses emit infrared light to locate any eyes in the scene. The system then looks for the glint created by the light reflecting off the cornea of the eye to determine if that person is looking directly at the wearer’s eyes. A small CCD camera connected to a handheld computer, worn at the hip, handles image processing.