EyeDraw

This is one of our design collaborators using EyeDraw to draw an outdoor scene.

EyeDraw is a research project at the University of Oregon that enables users to draw pictures solely with the use of their eyes. The project started in the summer of 2003.

An eye tracker is used to detect eye movements and that data is interpreted by the application in order to allow users to click on buttons, choose starting and ending points, and save and retrieve drawings.

The picture to the right shows an early version of EyeDraw and a drawing created by one of its developers. The challenge is to provide an intuitive and plausible way for users to intentionally place shapes on the canvas. This requires the program to distinguish between when a user is "looking" and when they are "drawing."

The Target Group:

EyeDraw is being designed for children and teenagers with severe mobility impairments. Although other software exists for them to type and read, a drawing program will be new for these users.
 

From left to right: Rob Hoselton, Anna Cavender,
and Anthony Hornof.

The People:

EyeDraw was envisioned by Anthony Hornof, director of the Cognitive Modeling and Eye Tracking Laboratory, and developed with Anna Cavender and Rob Hoselton.

Publications:

• Hornof, A. J. & Cavender, A. (2005). EyeDraw: Enabling children with severe motor impairments to draw with their eyes. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York: ACM, 161-170. Available as a PDF file.
• Hornof, A. J., Cavender, A., & Hoselton, R. (2004). EyeDraw: A system for drawing pictures with eye movements. Proceedings of ASSETS 2004: The Sixth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, Atlanta, Georgia, October 18-20, 86-93. Available as a PDF file.
• Hornof, A. J., Cavender, A., & Hoselton, R. (2004). EyeDraw: A system for drawing pictures with the eyes. Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI 2004: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York: ACM, 1251-1254. Available as a PDF file.
  

Executable:

EyeDraw_v2_7.zip (2 MB zip file)
If you download this program, please email Anthony Hornof and let him know how you heard about it and how you might be able to use it.

Source Code:

EyeDraw 2.7.1 Source Code and Programmer's Documentation (15 MB zip file)
If you download the source code, please email Anthony Hornof and let him know how you heard about it and how you might be able to use it.

Other Links:

A Progression of EyeDraw
Sunny Day

KVAL 13 News Coverage from April 23, 2004
6 MB QuickTime download (for Macintosh)
14 MB AVI download (for Windows)

Interview conducted by Astrid Schwarz and broadcast on Austrian Radio FM4 in May, 2004
3 MB MP3 and an English translation.

Other stories on this project appeared in The Register Guard, the Oregon Daily Emerald, the College of Arts and Sciences Cascade, and on KMTR-TV NBC, KEZI-TV ABC, and KPNW 1120 AM.

Last updated 1/19/2008 by ajh