Keep your eyeball on the ball!
Video gaming is a wonderful pastime that relies heavily on both sight and motor skills, which is a shame that those with disabilities aren't able to enjoy it. Engineering students from Imperial College London have constructed a video game and interface that's controllable using eye movements, which could upon up new opportunities for gamers of many more types.
The students have used an open source version of Pong and adapted it to be playable using a pair of special glasses containing an infrared light and a webcam that records the movement of one eye.
Although video games are a great application of any new technology, the equipment could be adapted to more sophisticated applications such as controlling wheelchairs and computer cursors.
Perhaps the most remarkable about the effort is that the technology built in this experiment costs just £25 (US$37). Current eye and brain tracking setups cost more than 1,000 times that much, though we'd hope they're more elaborate.
Dr Aldo Faisal, the team’s supervisor from the Department of Computing and the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, noted of their successes: "Remarkably, our undergraduates have created this piece of neurotechnology using bits of kit that you can buy in a shop, such as webcams. The game that they’ve developed is quite simple, but we think it has enormous potential, particularly because it doesn’t need lots of expensive equipment.
"We hope to eventually make the technology available online so anyone can have a go at creating new applications and games with it and we’re optimistic about where this might lead. We hope it could ultimately provide entertainment options for people who have very little movement. In the future, people might be able to blink to turn pages in an electronic book, or switch on their favourite song, with the roll of an eye."
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