PS3 Eye As A Webcam On Windows

September 30, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

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]

Creepy Robot Eye Follows You And Winks In Response

August 14, 2008 by rossfairgrieve 3 Comments

Opto-Isolator is an interesting art installation that was on display at the Bitforms Gallery in NYC. This single movement-tracking eye creates a statement about how we view art and is a response to the question “what if art could view us?”. The somewhat creepy display not only follows the person viewing it, but mimics blinks a second later and averts its gaze if eye contact is kept up for too long. Its creators [Golan Levin] and [Greg Baltus] have done a great job mimicking human behavior with such a simple element and the social implications of it are truly fascinating.

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]

Lightweight Eye Tracker

January 13, 2006 by Eliot 15 Comments

[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.]