A brand new device made from shop bought materials could soon be made available to patients suffering from spinal cord injury, Muscular Dystrophy, M.S and Parkinson's, and amputees, to assist in using their P.C's. What's more, the device called the GT3D costs less than £40!
It is designed around eye tracking software and was presented last week by Imperial College London using willing volunteers to play the old- school "Pong" game without using any hand controllers.
The device follows the wearers eye movements via tracking which in turn allows them to control an online cursor like you would a normal mouse on screen
This new device consists of two fast video game console cameras which get attached outside of the line of vision, to a pair of very cheap glasses. The cameras are used to track which direction the eyes are moving and in particular where the pupil is pointing, and then calibrations are made to determine where the user is looking on a screen. More detailed calibration will also allow researchers to work out how far into the distance they are looking, called 3D gaze.
Future enhancement of this software is hoped to assist disabled people to independently control electric wheelchairs by simply looking into the direction they want to move in, or perhaps the control and fine movement of a robotic prosthetic arm.
Researchers from the Imperial's Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Computing reported that the ease of use of the device was such that 6 of their test subjects, who had never used their eyes as a control input before, were registering a very respectable score during their game of Pong within a fifth of the able bodied testers after only 10 minutes of using the new device for the very first time.
The device only uses 1 watt of power and uses Wi-Fi or transmits via USB into any Windows or Linux computer.
Perhaps most impressive is the developers method for "clicking" on items on screen. The system was calibrated to take into account natural blinking, so the game play was not interrupted, and also imposed a command so that a wink of the eye would represent a mouse click ( thereby being a voluntary action unlike blinking).
The 3D eye tracking system comes in at a huge discounted price to other commercial systems thanks to developers using smarter software and utilising existing hardware. The future for the device will provide promise for patients and for one not sting the wallet.