NSF Support for Eye-Controlled Creative Expression
Associate Professor Anthony Hornof has been awarded a second grant from the National Science Foundation for research developing eye-controlled software for children with severe mobility impairments. The project builds on previous success developing the EyeDraw software, which enables children to draw pictures by just moving their eyes, but branches into several new areas of research.
"There are a few different scientific questions that we are asking here," says Dr. Hornof. "One is sort of an ethnographic anthropological question that relates to collaborating directly with children with severe motor impairments in the design of software. Another relates to a sort of artificial intelligence sense-making that the eye tracking system will learn to do, to sense that a pair of eyes has appeared in front of the eye tracker, and to present a series of stimuli to automatically calibrate the system to both the new user's eyes and level of understanding, incrementally and automatically with no caregiver intervention."
Dr. Hornof is also using eye tracking for numerous other projects, including the development of eye-controlled art and music. EyeMusic has been performed at multiple leading computer music conferences, including SEAMUS 2006 and NIME 2007. Dr. Hornof joined the department in 1999 and specializes in human-computer interaction. Dr. Hornof's research is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.
For more information on this project, visit the Eye-Controlled Creative Expression project website.