Scientist creates eye tracker for £43

[mr blur]

Neuroscientist Dr Aldo Faisal with his eye-tracking system. Photograph: David Levene

A scientist has created a budget device that can control a computer by tracking eye movement after stumbling on a £9.95 web camera being sold with a games console – a huge saving from the £20,000 that a similar apparatus used for medical research would have cost at the time.

German neuroscientist Dr Aldo Faisal was setting up a laboratory at Imperial College in London when he made the chance discovery.

Faisal and his team reconfigured two of the cameras and fixed them to a harness which attaches to the head, making a £43 device that opens up the use of computers to the 6 million people in the UK with restricted hand movement.

The cameras tell a computer where the user is looking, allowing a cursor to be moved around a screen while a wink enables the click of a mouse. While eye tracking had been done before, the team showed that it could be achieved at a fraction of the cost and could eventually lead to such devices being sold in shops.

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http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/05/scientist-creates-43-pound-eye-tracker-computers-restricted-mobility

[LeftishBrit]

1. Excellent - a lot of people might benefit from this!