PlayStation 3 Controlled With Head Movement

July 5, 2013 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

Our excitement just keeps building about how hackers can ply their skills to develop new adaptive technologies. Here’s another great example of custom control technology that helped [Steven] get back into gaming. The effects of muscular dystrophy have left him unable to use the stock PS3 controller. But after being paired up with [John Schimmel] he’s able to game again thanks to a head motion control system.

[John] looked at the way [Steven] interacts with the assistive technology at hand. He can drive his wheelchair with one finger, and interacts with his computer by moving his head. The computer detects a marker on the brim of his hat. [John] grabs input from the computer using Java and sends it to an Arduino board connected via USB. The Arduino has a USB Bit Whacker board letting it also connect to the PS3 as a controller. In the image above you can see the computer screen has a GUI for each of the controller’s buttons. [John] moves his head to select a control and clicks a button with his finger to actuate it.

If you like this check out some of the other assistive gaming hacks we’ve seen lately.

[via The Controller Project]

Adaptive Technology Used To Fly An IR Helicopter

February 4, 2013 by Mike Szczys 1 Comment

adaptive-tech-controlled-helicopter

This gentleman is using electrical impulses from his neck muscles to fly a toy helicopter around the room. The project is a demonstration of the AsTeRICS project which seeks to reduce the complexity of adapting the set of skills a disabled person can use to do a wide range of functions. In this case, controlling the helicopter could easily be switched to other tasks without changing the user interface hardware.

One of the plugins for the AsTeRICS project uses the OpenEEG library. This reads the signals coming from a pair of electrodes on top of each shoulder. In the video after the break you can see that as he flexes these muscles the changes in signal are mapped to the altitude of the helicopter. This is just one example of a wide range of inputs that include things like building a webcam-based mouse or using facial recognition.

The toy itself is being driven by an Arduino sending IR commands. We’ve seen quite a few project where the helicopter communications protocols are laid bare.

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