« Success on first circuit! | Main | ITP Spring 2005 show fantastic! »
May 03, 2005
NYU ITP Thesis Show on...
Thesis week is on for the ITP program at NYU and the presentations are really great. Here is the link: http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis. The very first presentation this afternoon was by Jason Babcock and his eye tracking software "Yarbus" here is his description: http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/detail.php?firstname=&lastname=Babcock
There is something intrinsically interesting in where the human eye focuses in our travels. Jasons presentation briefly outlined the history of eye tracking and the current solutions for industry and commerce that cost tens of thousands of dollars. By his own description Jason worked with eye tracking for some six years, and that interest lead him to ITP and culminated in the project that took 6 weeks to complete. The solution was software based on OSX. Apparently there are many solutions for eye tracking for the PC, but this is the first for the mac.
In his demonstration Jason donned a pair of light clear sport glasses with a small camera attached and fired up the software on a Powerbook. In just a few minutes he succeeded in calibrating the software to his own eye and then immediately the software showed a small cross hair that landed on whatever the eye did.
Jean-Marc Gauthier brought up the question of whether the software was suitable for medical application such as surgery. Jason replied that the frame rate was not quite fast enough nor the accuracy up to that kind of use, but there seems to be many other possibilities. The interesting thing is that Jean-Marc did a presentation at the IMC Expo that showcased a small piece that he put together that approximated the way the eye is focused sharply in the middle of our vision and gets a bit fuzzier around the periphery.
Jason also showed the way X and Y position data could be exported for other uses. I would love to see a sort of paint program for the eye that traces the path of the exported data and perhaps changes thickness or color of line as it spends more time in a certain part of a "canvas".
The quality of the presentations seems to be quite high this year with many interesting postulations. There are other great ideas that came out today but I am most interested in Jason's software "Yarbus".
Read more on his site: http://stage.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~jsb314/blog.html
Posted by flashicon at May 3, 2005 09:39 PM