If he gets them going fast enough he could make it look like his eyes are always open.

He could be the KING of Staring Contests!

Say it with me now: Satire.

I LOLED so hard on this. I agree, sticking with the glasses.

+1 for making my day XD.

LOL no doubt it works here, but that must feel funny.. And the flickering must suck :-P

+1 “will stay with the glasses”

Obviously fake. Unless hackaday is trying to troll us now

This is clearly so fake it’s amazing people think otherwise.

Wow, that looks painful

Imagine the eyelid muscles you can get with this! Iron man eyes!

this is obviously fake. why is it even posed here?

Yeah, looks fake to me. I wish it wasn’t.

because it was on engadget.

He has an accent and speaking english he cant be fake.

a fun idea, if nothing else.

It is a viral campaign, not hack! -_-’

Given that this IS real, repeatedly doing this would almost certainly lead to damage to the eyelid muscles.
No thanks. I can see in 3D already, and I don’t need it on my monitor.

It’s a joke guys. A deadpan joke. The guy is a special effects wizard in France.

HAD is posting this as if it is completely legitimate when clearly it is not.

The only reason it seems plausible is because it is possible to incite muscle contractions with electricity but seriously people? There are multiple levels of “totally hoax” written all over this. It’s am amusing video (arguably) but for HAD to post it with the tone and credibility as if they are presenting a fact does not reflect positively on the editors.

I hope nobody takes this serious. There’s no question about it. I’d rather see a Nintendo-On II video.

I’ve screwed around with electric muscle stimulators before and I can verify that this idea is totally plausible. If you put it to your temple it will close your eyelid. I’ve done it before. All I wanna know is how the hell are those little things being powered? The muscle stimulators I’ve used were powered by a 9v battery. Even if this is a hoax, I’m sure that the idea could actually be pulled off for real.

This video does a great job of demonstrating that most of our technology is already in the realm of magic for most people.

It’s a clever video that way too many people are falling for.

Putting aside *everything* wrong with the technology supposedly behind it, the simple impracticality of it, the wear is would presumably put on the eyelids, and all that jazz, there’s a simple, logical way that everyone should be able to spot the fake — his claim that there’s no reduction in brightness of his vision, as though there was nothing going on in the first place (not wearing anything in front of his eyes, all that jazz). There’s a reason why a TV screen gets dimmer when you look at it through shutter lenses — because only half the emitted light is getting to your eyes. That’s the point — half the light is for your right, and half is for your left; that’s the fundamental concept of stereoscopic 3D. Same is true for polarized lenses (“passive” glasses, like in the theatres) — they block the light polarized for the other eye. It seems dimmer because it *is* dimmer. The concept of blinking really fast, in time, if it were somehow to be made possible, is just going to block your entire vision half the time. While you might get a fluid picture (thanks to Persistence of Vision (POV), which HaD has featured products about *countless* times in the past), that doesn’t mean it’ll be just as bright. It’s just like dimming an LED by flickering it really fast — it may look solid if it goes fast enough, but if it’s off half the time, it’s not going to look as bright as when it’s on all the time.

This is just a massively successful trolling, and I wish the entire internet were in on it… but instead, people just try to avoid thinking whenever possible. Come on, guys… just… come on. You’re giving me more of a headache than that guy would’ve had, were he actually blinking that fast.

that guy is obviously confused by 3d bullshitting and his inability to talk to women…

“reduces crowsfeet up to 15%”

there you go ;)

Its not practical, but AWESOME proof of concept!

Well done to the guy, very clever.

This is sooo…differently abled.

I think its social commentary, and if so its clever. He’s only slightly exaggerating the extents we go to for our gadgets.

Seriously, this ain’t real. Hilarious, yes. Wonderful, yes. Suitable for hackaday? No.

The number of people falling for this makes me understand why there are so many perpetual motion machines under construction.

a blink is 1/63 second for the full motion (yahoo it). at 120 hz (as demonstrated) that just inst possible as you must be fully closed for a whole 60th second per eye at a time.

Matskat – dont be a troll. he recorded in slow motion and speed it up.

Looks fake.. Wonder what’s the power source? And why HaD now posting hoax like this? >:(

Unless he is Geordi from the future showing a prototype of his JORDY.

And is it just me or does he look like the dad from Growing Pains?

WTF? What is this? Is HaD some sort of youtube? What a bunch of losers with the FAKE comments.

1) To stimulate a muscle you don’t need much of a current, just the right voltage. It is entirely plausible that they are running the wireless electrodes from tiny cells.

2) If you morons even cared to google, you would find that the electrodes are in the right spot, that is, over the orbicularis oculi muscle:
http://www.infofisioterapi.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/M.-Occipitofrontalis.jpg

3) He seems to have deliberately programmed the stimulation to start and stop gradually possibly to somewhat make it less aggressive.

4) So it is perfectly plausible to have abdominal stimulation devices running from two AAA batteries but it is totally “FAKE” to stimulate the orbicularis oculi muscle? What a bunch of idiots..

Hack-a-Day thank you for posting this. I wish that someday we will have moderation here, the comment SNR is getting very low :|

@Caleb Kraft

It would be nice to include a schematic for a simple EMS in the article:
http://electroschematics.com/2083/electronic-muscle-stimulator/

As for the “what’s powering those things” comment on the main post, what powers a tiny bluetooth earpiece? Or how about hearing aids? The amount of power you need to make muscles twitch isn’t that much, just needs a way to get under the skin (conductive gel or needle), or high voltage (but very low current).

The other issue here is that people assume that because the guy said you need a 120Hz tv that you don’t possibly have enough time. But you do. The reason for 120Hz is possibly to reduce ghosting effects, the actual 3D is probably only 30fps each side.

Now, it could all be a hoax, but the guy would have to be pretty good with aftereffects (for eyelid motion) or very good with slowing down his speech (and good at dubbing). My bet is that it’s not a hoax (eyelid part), but that the 3D effect isn’t actually working as expected.

@Caleb

I will be opening a performance art show soon. We will be taking recent organ donors and hooking those electrode up to their faces for a distopia animatronics story

Ive played with a muscle stimulator before and while you can send these fast pulses to your muscles I doubt the muscle would respond as fast but you could get pretty close. Id have to try it, Im alittle sketchy about the size of the stimulators hes using they seem extremely small to be real but im no expert on stimulator design. The fake comments need to stop, All this isnt out of the realm of possibility. Ohh and everyone should own a muscle stimulator their fun as hell but dont go overboard.

Krafty Caleb is at it again … I certainly hope he really meant this as a joke, and didn’t fall for this one like so many others did …

@HaD admins-
The trolls are killing HaD. Seriously.

It’ll suck if I have to start relying on instructables to feed my hack cravings… .. . . .

This has gone viral pretty fast. Both Engadget and CNET News had this posted Sunday afternoon.

Jesus, people. No one on the Internet knows what a joke is anymore.

This has to be fake. I won’t site maximum blink rates, or how this would somehow wirelessly sync for R/L frames from the tv, or how the lack of a perceived drop in brightness isn’t right (think 50% pwm on your eye). I will instead point towards how muscles react when used repeatedly and rapidly. They run out of oxygen and start working anaerobically. This causes a buildup of H+ ions which help the muscle use more oxygen but will result in a condition called acidosis if the activity is continued for extended periods. This causes PAIN. Try twitching your foot as fast as possible continuously for two hours. Perhaps if this device actually interrupted the nerve pathways from the eye to the brain and “blanked” one eye this would work, but this isn’t claimed. Polarized contact lenses would be a better alternative, with the plus that there is no HV within sticking distance of your brain.

Is it me or published articles in hackaday have less quality than before?

Hahahah!! Wait until they demo the xrated version..

Someone please remove this major threat to the gene pool.

Apparently, HaD adheres to the modern (and sadly all-too-popular) “We are supposed to report stuff, whether it’s true or not (and don’t even try to look it up a bit, you know, see if it sounds legit or fishy…), simply because others reported it” school of journalism – as opposed to the classic one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards#Accuracy_and_standards_for_factual_reporting)

…A sad, sad day for HaD.

@elektrophreak

did he mention 60hz? Even if it was 5 times a second, it would still be 3d (just look shit)

I’m sure this is an achievable, yet painful feat.

For the naysayers, I’d suggest a session with their chiropractor’s TENS unit :)

Since muscles are essentially (dare i say, designed?) to return to their normal positions, very much like springs, their contraction can be caused with an electrical pulse and the release would essentially return the muscle to its resting state.

However, i would agree that after a few hours, the eyelids would develop biceps … or something to that effect :)

I thought this was a Joke the first time I saw it. a little research onto stereoscopy imagery (thank Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger for Wikipedia!) and it had been verified. wow. wtF! It looks one hell of a workout for the muscles in the eyelids. people of the future will be conditioned to blink like that anytime.

Perhaps a pair of these could be synchronized to the video and stuck beside your eyes:
http://www.uxsight.com/product/9683/electric-shock-shocking-hand-buzzer-funny-gag-gift-prank-joke.html

When I was a kid I attached high-voltage pulsating electrodes to my temples. Instead of blinking eyelids, I saw rainbow-colored sparkles (phosphenes).

I used was a speaker voicecoil transformer from a vacuum tube radio, wired in reverse to act as a step-up transformer, with the primary coil in series with a buzzer and a flashlight battery. Instead of a buzzer you could use a small relay with the coil in series with its normally-closed contact.

Of course, the current flowed between the electrodes, so it was probably stimulating the optic nerve.

A similar technique is used to give vision to some blind people, which was good enough for one blind man to drive a car in a controlled environment:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/v4x3814350047543/

So this is where the lame editors from slashdot come?

Oh come on, even an electronics N00B knows this is a joke.