Here’s a story of an ocularist who makes prosthetic eyes from glass. Obviously here’s a necessary and important service, but we find it surprising that this seems something of a dying art. [Mr. Haas] lives in the UK but notes that most glass eye makers have been German, and tend to pass the trade down to their children. With that father-to-son daughter transfer of knowledge becoming less common these days we wonder just how many people know how to do this any longer.

But don’t despair, it’s not that there won’t be a source for ocular prosthesis, as acrylic eyes are quite common. But what we see in the video after the break is breathtaking and we hate to see the knowledge and experience lost the way vacuum tube manufacture and even common blacksmithing have.

[via Engadget]

This robot eye can move five times faster than the human eye. It’s capable of being used to follow a human gaze and, as you can see by that coin, it’s small enough to be used in pairs. When used to follow your gaze it needs a custom-made eye tracker. The thought here is that a lot can be learned about a person’s psyche by monitoring what they are focusing on. But we wonder about the augmented reality properties of a setup like this.

Imagine a pair of glasses as a heads up display. If this camera knows where you’re looking it can process the items in your gaze and overlay digital information. As with all new technology there are obvious military uses for this, but we’d be more interested in a Flickr pool type collection of people’s real-world experiences. Like subscribing to the locations of that thumb drive network in NYC and having the camera/glasses guide you to the nearest installation.

Want to see how fast this thing responds? Check out the video after the break.

[via Neatorama]

If you’re in need of eye surgery you might just find yourself strapped into this contraption. It’s a magnetic field generator used to manipulate a tiny, untethered probe. It’s called OctoMag and the idea is that a robot less than half a millimeter in size is injected into your vascular system and, through the use of those coils, it busts up blood clots in the small passages inside of the eye.

Once you’ve seen the clip after the break we’re sure you’ll agree that this is amazing technology. Nonetheless it makes us cringe to think of the procedure done on a living organism but we’re sure that fear will subside given time. For now this seems more like a treatment from A Clockwork Orange.

The EyeSeeCam is a rig that attaches to your noggin and points a camera wherever your gaze falls. There’s actually four cameras involved here, one to track each eye via a reflecting piece of acrylic, one as your third eye, and finally the tracking camera above that. There are some legitimate medical uses for this type of technology, but we enjoyed seeing some of the videos that [Johannes Vockeroth] put together showing everyday activities. We’ve embedded several clips after the break including an example of reading a book while wearing the apparatus. The third eye camera provides the wide shot with close-ups of the wearer’s visual focus.

Eye tracking camera

Read a book with the EyeSeeCam

Opthalmologic applications

[Thanks The Ideanator]

[Kyle McDonald] has kept himself busy working on 3D scanning in realtime. He’s posted a writeup that takes us through the concepts, tools, and assembly of a DIY 3d scanning camera. You should remember a preview of this method posted earlier this month, but now it’s time to build your own. You’ll need a camera, a projector, and some open source software to process the image data. Using these simple tools, [Kyle] turned out much better video than before. Take a look after the break to see his results from scanning at 60 fps using a PS3 Eye. The trick to this setup is getting the correct synchronization between the projector and the camera, something that could be improved with a bit of extra hacking.

Does [Kyle's] name sound familiar? It should, he’s got a long history of quality hacks that we’ve featured over the years. If you’re looking to use a scanner as a multitouch, add some music to tea time, or play with your skittles his work will give you a shove in the right direction.

The EyeWriter is an open source eye tracking initiative. This is the mature version of the KanEye project we covered in April. Collaboratively developed by Free Art and Technology (FAT), OpenFrameworks, and the Graffiti Research Lab, they seek to aid a friend of theirs who suffers from the degenerative muscle disease ALS.

They’ve come a long way since we last looked in on the progress. The hardware used is pretty much the same: a set of sunglasses sans lenses with the CCD from a Sony PlayStation 3 Eye mounted in front of one eye. IR LEDs surround the CCD and point at the eye to increase the contrast between pupil and the rest of the eye. The major improvement comes with the software. Eye tracking appears to be extremely precise and they’ve written a custom drawing program to take advantage of their interface. Check in on their developer page for source code and a video walk-through of the software.

After the break you can see video of [Tempt1] using the system to create some tags. We’re thankful for the success this project has seen as this guy can do a lot better with his eye than we can with our hands.

[Thanks Jessee]

[Max] was happy to see that the PlayStation 3 Eye has support in the newer Linux kernels. Having sat in his closet for quite some time, this would give the camera another chance at usefulness. Unfortunately, the driver doesn’t include framerate selection and color correction so he set about writing a patch to control the color settings. As you can see above, his success greatly improves the image quality you get from the device.

We get the feeling that the camera peripherals for Sony’s gaming devices seem like a good idea but don’t have much staying power as a realistic gaming interface. With contributions like [Max's], they can be re-purposed. The PS2 had its own, the EyeToy, which has long enjoyed driver support for Linux. The NUI Group does a lot of work with multi-touch and recommends the PS3 Eye for use with their projects because they’re inexpensive with high frame rates and decent picture quality.

Great work [Max]. It looks like he’s sent this patch upstream to be considered for incorporation into the kernel’s webcam module.

The NUI Group has been working hard to bring the PS3 Eye to windows.  From the factory, this device has pretty impressive specs, but no windows drivers.  After a bit of hacking, they’ve developed a driver for it and released it on their forums.  The main reason they are so interested in it is that it can capture full frame at 60 frames per second, making it perfect for multi touch sensing.  Now that they’ve got it working with windows, they’re working on a custom PS3 Eye filter for touchlib.

[via PS3 Fanboy, thanks vor]

If they wanted to, [Levin] and [Baltus] could possibly crank up the spook factor by adding facial recognition and programming it to remember how certain people interact with it, then tailor its behavior to wink at different rates or become more shy or bold, depending on the personality of the person watching it. Of course, that would require that someone goes back to it more than once…

[via Glass Tumbler]

[Jason S. Babcock] and [Jeff B. Pelz] put together this paper on building a simple, lightweight eyetracker (PDF) to foster the creation of open source eyetracking software. All of the components are mounted to a cheap pair of safety glasses. The eyetracker uses a technique called “dark-pupil” illumination. An IR LED is used to illuminate the eye. The pupil appears as a dark spot because it doesn’t reflect the light. A bright spot also appears on the cornea where the IR is directly reflected. An eye camera is mounted next to the IR LED to record the image of eye with these two spots. Software tracks the difference between the two spots to determine the eye orientation. A laser mounted to the frame helps with the initial calibration process.  A scene camera placed above the eye records what the eye is viewing. The video from these two cameras can be compared in real time or after the experiment is concluded.

[thanks austin y.]