Eye-controlled gaming arrives with GT3D
Matthew Ray | 17 July 2012
In recent tests the GT3D eye tracking system allowed users who had never used their eyes as control devices to rack up a respectable score in classic retro videogame Pong within 10 minutes of play (see the video for Pong play.)
The GT3D is made up of two fast videogame console cameras, costing less than £20 each, that are attached, outside of the line of vision, to a pair of glasses that cost just £3. The cameras constantly take pictures of the eye, working out where the pupil is pointing, and from this the researchers can use a set of calibrations to work out exactly where a person is looking on the screen.
Even more impressively, the Researchers from Imperial College London are also able to use more detailed calibrations to work out the 3D gaze of the subjects in other words, how far into the distance they were looking.
The gadget allows you to control a cursor on a screen running Windows or Linux just like a normal computer mouse. To ‘click’ the screen all you have to do is blink and the system wirelessly transmits the signal.
‘We have achieved two things: we have built a 3D eye tracking system hundreds of times cheaper than commercial systems and used it to build a real-time brain machine interface that allows patients to interact more smoothly and more quickly than existing invasive technologies that are tens of thousands of times more expensive,’ says Dr Aldo Faisal, Lecturer in Neurotechnology at Imperial's Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Computing.
The GT3D is currently being developed to help the millions of people suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injuries or limb loss but who’s to say how the technology will be used in the future? And now the scientists have cracked the cost issue eye-control could be coming to a console to you soon...
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