Samsung’s Galaxy S4 does a whole bunch of things with its front facing camera that are genuinely new, though I’m not so sure if said things are actually useful. But enough about that, according to Engadget, a company out of California called “DigitalOptics” has revealed that they’re the guys behind the GS4’s eye tracking features.

Specifically, the press release says Samsung has “signed a multi-year license for DOC’s Face Detection and Face Tracking software.” What does their software do? It tracks your pupils, it tracks fast moving objects, it tracks people, basically it’ll track anything. The company also makes dedicated hardware blocks that can speed up their software, so I’m incredibly curious to see if Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa has DigitalOptics’ I/O blocks on die.

http://youtu.be/UhV7i8Kfh0M

Now that the word is out, will other companies try to sign deals with DigitalOptics? Possibly, though I’m not too familiar with their product portfolio or patent holdings. You never know, Samsung could have signed a deal with this company in order to not get sued.