We have heard of a tongue-controlled wheelchair that offers a greater degree of freedom and autonomy to the disabled, but how about a pair of brain interface glasses that cost all of just $65 to produce, albeit this pair of glasses can be used to control computers? Yes sir, this unique pair of eyewear allows the wearer to operate a computer using one’s eyes, moving the cursor around just as though there was a conventional mouse in place.
These glasses did not come from some high-tech lab, but rather, were created from off-the-shelf materials by PhD student William Abbott and his lecturer Dr Aldo Faisal. Dr Faisal, a lecturer in Neurotechnology at Imperial College said, “This system consists of basically two things. One is a device, a piece of hardware which is basically an eye tracking system that William is wearing here on his head. This basically consists of two sets of very fast cameras that record the movements of the eyes and enable us to work out where on the screen William is looking. And the other part of the script is smart software that basically decodes the intentions that William has about interacting with the computer and translates them into commands that enable them to control the computer just by using his eyes.”
Involutary blinking will be ignored by the computer since it has been calibrated as such, so all controls are done using voluntarily control, with the wink being the chief protagonist here.
Requiring just one watt of power and being able to transmit data wirelessly, this could open up a whole new frontier for the bedridden and disabled.
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