Controlling Your Mac With Head Movements

Starting with macOS Catalina 10.15.4 you can use Accessibility to control your cursor with your head, and even click and drag with facial expressions. Even if you don't need this functionality, it can be useful as a temporary way to control your Mac is some situations, or just a way to give your hands a rest.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's take a look at how you can control your Mac with your head.
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So a new feature introduced in Catalina 10.15.4 was the ability to control the cursor with your head and even do actions like clicks using expressions. So to turn this on go to System Preferences and then go to Accessibility. Then scroll down to Pointer Control. Here you'll see Alternate Control Methods. Click there. 
First let's take a look at Enable Head Pointer. Before we enable it let's look at the options. When I click on that I can see the Camera and I can choose if I have more than one. I can choose two modes Relative to Head. So as I move my head it should control the cursor or when I Face the screen edges it should move it up, down, left ,and right. I can change the speed and adjust that as needed. I also have a switch here to turn it On or Off easily. So let's do that using F10 but I can reassign it to any keyboard shortcut.
Now let's turn it on. I'll turn it on here and it says it's on. You can see the cursor is kind of moving a little bit as I talk. Ideally you wouldn't be talking while you're actually using it. Now I'm not using my hands here and if I move my head to the left you can see the cursor moves with it. To the right, up, and down. So I can move it all around. It's jittery and not perfect but it will get the job done. Now you can also control it with the trackpad or mouse at the same time. So if I just stop moving my head and start dragging the cursor around that takes over. So you can combine the use of your head and of the mouse or trackpad in doing this.
Alright now let's explore Alternate Pointer Actions. So let's look at the options there. As you can imagine moving the cursor around with just your head isn't going to be very useful if you can't at least click. So here there are a couple of assigned different ways to click. You can use the F11 or F12 keys. The idea here is that maybe you have an alternate keyboard or switch system and they're sending F11 or F12 signals and you can use those as left and right click. But you could click the Plus button here instead of a physical switch and assign one of these to a facial expression. 
So let's look at what the facial expressions are. Smile, Open Mouth, Raise Eyebrows, or Stick out Tongue. For instance we can set Raise Eyebrows to left click. Hit Done. So now I can click something by just moving my eyebrows. Let's give that a try. I'll turn both of these on. Now I'll move my head around like this and let's click here. I click here and you can see it works pretty well. You could still click using the mouse or trackpad.
So as you can see you can add some other ones which would be critical for actually using this without actually using the trackpad or mouse. So I can set say a Smile or let's say an Open Mouth and make that Drag and Drop. So now I can move the cursor up and I'm going to open my mouth and try to drag the window a bit. You could see it works!
Now, of course, these are meant for people that need this functionality but it doesn't mean that the rest of us can't use it as well. It could be useful in situations where you just want to browse the web or maybe read a book in the books app, or something like that, and you want to be able to sit back and give your hands a rest from the keyboard and mouse or trackpad. It also could be good in a temporary situation. For instance if you have carpal tunnel or maybe you injure your hand or something like that and it kind of hurts to use it and you want to maybe have an alternative to controlling the mouse in some situations you can turn this on. Use the shortcut to quickly switch it On or Off and maybe give your hand a rest for five or ten minutes while you control the mouse with your head and do things like clicking using facial expressions.
If nothing else it's an interesting thing to play with. It may give us a clue as to some future capabilities that we have. Imagine if this gets even better in the future and we're able to combine this with voice control and other things to control computers in ways other than using a mouse and keyboard.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Controlling Your Mac With Head Movements”

Douglas Brace

4 years ago

Gary, I work in higher education as an educational technologist. Do you know if these features require a specific quality of webcam or are they only compatible with the webcam that Apple puts in its computers? Also, and I looked in iOS, do you know if these features are available Apple's mobile devices? Thank you!

Gary Rosenzweig

Douglas: I'm doing this using my unconventional webcam. The webcams that come with Macs are actually pretty low-quality (720p) so I assume any decent 720 or 1080 one will work. But just try it with what you have and see. This is a Mac feature, it wouldn't make much sense on a mobile device now, since it controls the cursor, and there isn't a cursor on mobile devices. But that is also changing, so maybe eventually this will be there too.

Ted G. Freitas

Gary, great tip! Thanks for always showing us things that are hidden under the hood!

Heidi Adams

Does this"head movement" program allow you control a live Keynote show? Live to a projected screen?

Heidi: it isn't a program. It is built into the operating system. I suppose you could control a presentation with it, but I'm not sure why you would unless that was your only way.

Comments Closed.

Controlling Your Mac With Head Movements

Comments: 5 Responses to “Controlling Your Mac With Head Movements”

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