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Kyle McDonald edited this page Mar 8, 2012 · 5 revisions

This week we're going to talk about blink detection and eye tracking (or gaze estimation).

Class Notes

Hodgepodge

...the blink is either something that helps an internal separation of thought to take place or it is an involuntary reflex accompanying the mental separation that is taking place anyway ... and that blink will occur where a cut could have happened had the conversation been filmed. Not a frame earlier or later. ... Your job is partly to anticipate, partly to control the thought processes of the audience. To give them what they want and/or what they need just before they have to 'ask' for it -- to be surprising yet self-evident at the same time. If you are too far behind or ahead of them, you cause problems, but if you are right with them, leading them ever so slightly, the flow of events feels natural and exciting at the same time. (In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch)

Dopamine and schizophrenia can cause increased blink rates.

The flow of visual information to the brain is halted by up to 450 milliseconds with every blink, and we lose up to 6 seconds of information every minute ... moviegoers who sit through a 150-minute film have their eyes shut for up to 15 minutes.Synchronised blinking stops viewers missing the action

Startle Response by William Meyer, and the involuntary blink.

The Aleph by Borges, and the weight of responsibility for the all-seeing gaze.

Retroreflection is an interesting phenomena that helps with gaze estimation. Eyewriter works because of retroreflection.

A non-optical gaze estimation tool is called Electrooculography (EOG). You can use it while people are sleeping to study their REM.

"Here's looking at you, Kid." by Aram Bartholl.

"Conversation Piece" and What You Missed by Michael Kontopoulos.

Andrew Schneider hacked a polaroid camera to be triggered when he blinks.

Golan Levin has been working with blink detection for some time. reface uses blink detection to swap faces. eyecode uses blinks to trigger recording. optoisolator blinks one second after you do. Golan has a nice TED talk where he talks about the why and how of these pieces. He briefly discusses mirror neurons.

Irides themselves are incredibly beautiful. They're a strong biometric identifier because they are unique and hard to fake (see some examples of software like here and here). In sci-fi some people are dreaming about eye replacement but I don't think this has actually been demonstrated yet. Apparently retinal recognition is even more secure, as it uses the vessels in the back of your eyes.

Before working on the eyewriter, Chris Sugrue created re-gaze along the same lines as the media art classic Der Zerseher (I think the name might come from zerstören/destroy and seher/viewer as used in fernseher/remote viewer/television).

Heatmaps are a classic application of gaze estimation data for visualization. Another kind of "trace" just shows saccades and paths, as with this classic example from Yarbus.

Radiolab had a nice show on blinking.

Blink Stories from Lia Martinez.

Reading Code Together

Eyewriter

There are two repositories on GitHub, both active. It used to be on Google Code.

BlinkExample

Available on the ofxFaceTracker repository.

EyeOSC

Download here. It will be on GitHub soon, but I need to clean the big files first.

Assignment

Make something awesome with one of these tools.

I would ask for a link to your favorite eye tracking project, but I don't think there are enough this time.