Going to continue with my Eye Tracking idea… here are some pictures of the device I have built…

Eye Tracking

Need to change/enhance the application:

1. Improve eye tracking code
1. Edge detection on pupil
2. Calculate relative position of cornea reflection and pupil
3. Calibration procedure
2. Instead of pulling pictures from Flickr, use “local” pictures
1. Select the pictures in a “meaningful” way – by color, theme or emotion?
3. Show the “winner” after each slide
4. Log what pictures are winners
5. Create a web page with results

Still working on the “purpose” of this project other than the rating tool… want to try to draw some kind of conclusion from the “experiment”.

Some other ideas that are swirling in my head:

1. Blur areas of picture/video eyes are not looking at
1. User using the eye tracking device would see it all in focus
2. “Audience” would see the in-focus and out of focus areas
2. Present an out of focus video/picture. Wherever user looks at more, it start to come into focus

After having two fellow ITPers come up to me asking me if I was a professor I started thinking about the first impressions we have of people and how we perceive ourselves in one way and other people see us in another way. Or sometimes you are simply not aware of the image you are presenting to the world.

It would be interesting to find out how other people see me… both people who know me/interact with me and people who just see me walking by.

Based on that I teamed up with Caleb and Joo-Youn to create a mobile app to explore this fact.

After some brainstorming, we came up with a game/social network/informative site. Here it how it might work:

1. First we pre-populate the database with all of ITP student’s names and pictures
2. We then send out a picture of someone to your phone
3. You then have to find that person and take a picture with them
1. You can “pass” that person by replying with the word “NEXT”
4. Upload the picture to our system to get points
5. Get extra points by tagging the person with a one word adjective
6. Get the following picture
7. The more points you have, the more often your picture will be sent
8. On the web you will see the adjectives people have been described
9. You can send us the phone number of a friend to invite them to the game
1. They will receive a message asking for their name and picture
10. You can see what people have said about you by sending the word “TAGS”
11. If you tag someone with the same adjective they tagged you, you are a match and both get a message

So… my previous surfaces were “too complex” for milling so I had to go with this one… Basically a planar surface to which I applied several sine wave deformations to obtain the result:

Surface Topology

Here are some images of what I intend to send the mill… we are going to send the files to Associated Fabrication… here are some of the pictures from our visit there: PHOTOS

Here is a quick video of the mill in action:

This code is based on Dan Shiffman’s recursive tree example… modified it a little to have different trees in terms of branch timing and branching angles…
Click to create new trees.

Self Conscious
Expanding Interactive Video – midterm

– Sitting with back to the audience, head down, eyes closed
– Eye Tracking gear on (one camera on my eye and one facing forward)
– Laptop in hand
– Ask everyone to turn on their own web cams and arrange them so people behind can see each others screens
– Music starts
– Fades from black to image of my eyes opening
– Turn and face the audience
– Start mixing the video reacting to the music

The spirals finally came to life…

Spiral Print