I ‘drove’ a car using my EYES and it felt like an episode of Black Mirror...

AI can handle some mind-blowing tasks these days but I never imagined it enabling people to drive cars using nothing but their eyes.

Well, that's exactly what I did this week.

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Chinese firm Honor unveiled a brand new Magic 6 Pro smartphone at an event in Barcelona packing a bewildering eye-tracking feature.

Sensors and AI inside the device know where your eyes are looking on the screen so you can tap buttons without lifting a finger.

The experience was eerily like something I could imagine in an episode of Black Mirror

It's a feature that could eventually be a real life-changer for people with disabilities and movement disorders.

And to demonstrate the tech's wildest potential, Honor has come up with a concept that allows users to drive cars.

The Sun was among selected media invited to test the wacky tool out - see our full experience in the video above and read-on below for the verdict.

AI give it a try

As a concept, it's important to point out I wasn't able to drive the car on an actual road.

Instead, it's in a safe warehouse environment and the vehicle has very strict limits so it won't accidentally veer off if I look at the wrong button.

I also controlled the car outside from a safe distance, I didn't sit inside while it was moving.

To begin, you have to calibrate your eyes with the smartphone so it can recognise them.

Once that's done, there's a dedicated app featuring four simple buttons: engine start, engine off, move forward, move backward.

All you have to do is stare at the relevant button and the car will do its business automatically.

My experience was a bit hit and miss - the ignition started fine.

But when I tried to move it forward the eye-tracking took a while to pick up on my glare.

It reversed without any issue and then the engine off button took a while.

Others testing it out in my group had no problems, so perhaps I needed to calibrate it better or hold the phone up higher.

We're clearly a long way from actually driving cars on roads with our eyes - if ever - but the experience was eerily like something I could imagine in an episode of Black Mirror.

As I explained earlier, I can definitely see how this feature might be useful for people with disabilities - once it's been refined.

You can also envisage how it could work nicely when you're actually driving behind the wheel and want to do something like answer a call without physically picking up your phone (though you can already do this with your voice).

It's taken years to make self-driving cars a thing and we've only began to scratch the surface, so you can imagine how long it would take eye-tracking controlled cars to become a norm - but it was fun to try.

The ability to control everyday apps with your eyes will appear on the Honor Magic 6 Pro in an update due to land in the next few months.

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