HK$120 webcam creates eye tracker to control computers, changing lives

A British neuroscientist has created a low-budget device that can control a computer by tracking eye movement after stumbling on a £9.95 (HK$120) web camera sold with a games console. A similar device for medical research could have cost up to £20,000.

Dr Aldo Faisal was setting up a laboratory at Imperial College London when he made the chance discovery. He and his team reconfigured two of the cameras and fixed them to a harness that attaches to the head, creating a £43 device that enables people with restricted hand movement to use computers.

The cameras communicate with the computer, allowing a cursor to be moved around a screen, with a wink to click the mouse. While eye tracking had been done before, the team showed that it could be achieved at a fraction of the cost.

This year, similar technology was used to produce a wheelchair controlled using the eyes. The user can talk while the software detects where they want to go via a £120 eye-tracking bar usually employed to see if people are looking at advertisements.

The software can distinguish between when the user is looking around and when they want to move and the wheelchair responds within 10 milliseconds.

"It may not be the best hardware to do the job but we have by now such good software algorithms that can do data analytics and data processing that you put the intelligence into the software, and not the hardware," Faisal said.