Eye Tracking: EyeWriter Featured in SXSW Conference
National Public Radio was down in Austin, Texas over the weekend to cover the South By Southwest festival, an annual music showcase and tech conference, which attracted musicians, artists, filmmakers, techies, and fans from around the globe. As usual, this year was chock full with concerts featuring the latest and greatest rising stars in independent music, but NPR managed to find something interesting to us, a group of, as they put it, “digital bohemians” who have created a low cost, do-it-yourself eye tracking device.
The EyeWriter was actually designed for Tony Quan, a Los Angeles-based graffiti artist who was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2003. As we’ve written in the past here at Eye Tracking Update, Lou Gehrig’s disease, officially called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that effects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Degeneration of these motor neurons, which reach from the brain and the spinal cord to muscles throughout the body, is a fatal disease, beginning with loss of physical movement as the brain loses the ability to control and initiate muscle movement. Visionaries like Stephen Hawking, the physicist and author at Cambridge University, UK, are affected with ALS, leaving them nearly completely paralyzed.
ALS, however, seems to steer clear of affecting eye movement and vision, and so Zach Lieberman of the Graffiti Research Lab designed an eye tracker to enable Tony Quan to continue drawing and making art. Lieberman and developers from Free Art and Technology, OpenFrameworks, and the Ebeling Group created a low-cost, open-source hardware and software for Quan, providing him the ability to continue to create with his eyes.
Commercial eye trackers are quite expensive for just one individual. “To get a device is $10,000-$15,000,” says Lieberman. But the EyeWriter only costs about $50, or the price of an iPod shuffle, something that could potentially make waves at a conference like South By Southwest.
Essentially, Lieberman and his team bought a pair of sunglasses, assembled a wire frame, and mounted a small camera near the eye. They wrote their own software to track the movements of the eye; the device can be calibrated for various users, enabling them to communicate with the computer. Lieberman’s team researched Quan’s letters and drawings, studying his art form to create software that would enable him to continue with his unique designs.
Of course, it’s not as quick as drawing or painting with your hand, “but he can plot points,” says Lieberman. “And from plotting points, create letters. And from creating letters, create words. And then color the words, shade the words, extrude them in 3-D, add different features.”
Pretty exciting stuff for an artist with ALS, and keeping things on the cheap is a step in the right direction in the world of eye tracking.