Look Mario, No Hands: Eyewriter Creators Bring Eye and Voice Control to Gaming
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Monday, Aug 09, 2010
What the Eyewriter could do for really intense staring contest art, the Super Mario Hacks do for lazy gamers everywhere. And as paralyzed graffiti artist Tempt One illustrated with the Eyewriter, these killer open source apps make up a system that can prove very useful for anyone with the inability to use their hands.
At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, members of New York’s open source programming lab openFrameworks debuted a system that allows users to play Super Mario Bros. with their eyes and their voice.
Using eye and voice tracking for video gaming isn’t just frivolity. Writes openFrameworks, these kinds of inputs are “very important to helping people communicate, and in the case of something like an eye tracker, it might be their only means.”
Zach Lieberman plays Super Mario simply by making “bloop” sounds:
A member of openFrameworks playing Mario with his eye movements.
This solution looks so much more elegant than controlling your video games with a wand, or a system that requires you to hook up electrodes to your face (ouch). And because it’s open source, this system could potentially spread quickly and cheaply to people who aren’t just wowed by it, but need it too.
Plus, consider the obvious comedic potential of an arcade full of gamers controlling Mario by imitating the sounds of the game.
User interfaces are rapidly moving away from touch control to recognition of other sensory data. Feast your eyes for instance on the Eye Phone , or text 2.0, which rely on eye tracking for a more intuitive control system.
And see an interview with openFramework founder Zach Lieberman at the Creators Project, and learn more about the Eyewriter on Motherboard.
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Email: alexp at motherboard dot tv. @pasternack,
