Engineering students in London have developed a controller that enables eye-controlled movements in a video game, signaling the possibility someday for people with severe physical disabilities to enjoy video games for the first time.
The students, from Imperial College London, constructed the controller as a pair of glasses containing an infrared light and a webcam to record the movements of one eye. That camera was linked to a laptop, where a program the students had written synchronized the player’s eye movements to the game – in this case, a version of Pong
The students and their faculty supervisor think the technology is proof of concept for creating more complex eye-controlled games, while also enabling eye control of wheelchairs or cursors on a computer screen.
The best part? It was constructed for a thousandth of the cost of current state-of-the-art eye movement technology. The students’ rig cost roughly Ā£25 to make. High end eye movement systems for use in brain research cost about Ā£27,000.
