22-03-2011, 04:39 PM
ABSTRACT
How do you communicate when your brain is active but your body isn't? The EyeWriter, a collaboration from the Ebeling Group, the Not Impossible Foundation and Graffiti Research Lab, uses low-cost eye-tracking glasses and open-source software to allow people suffering from any kind of degenerative neuromuscular syndrome like ALS(Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) to write and draw by tracking their eye movement and translating it to lines on a screen. The device was created for Tony "Tempt" Quan, an L.A.-based graffiti artist who was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease in 2003. After trying the EyeWriter the first time he'd drawn anything since he was fully paralyzed, Quan said, "It feels like taking a breath after being held underwater for five minutes."
Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze (where we are looking) or the motion of an eye relative to the head and hence is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movement. There are a number of methods for measuring eye movement. The most popular variant uses video images from which the eye position is extracted. Other methods use search coils or are based on the electrooculogram.
Foveated imaging is a digital image processing technique in which the image resolution, or amount of detail, varies across the image according to one or more "fixation points." A fixation point indicates the highest resolution region of the image and corresponds to the center of the eye's retina, the fovea. The resulting data can be statistically analyzed and graphically rendered to provide evidence of specific visual patterns. By examining fixations, saccades, pupil dilation, blinks and a variety of other behaviors researchers can determine a great deal about the effectiveness of a given medium or product.
A wide variety of disciplines use eye tracking techniques, including cognitive science, psychology (notably psycholinguistics, the visual world paradigm), human-computer interaction (HCI), marketing research and medical research (neurological diagnosis). Specific applications include the tracking eye movement in language reading, music reading, human activity recognition, the perception of advertising, and the playing of sport.