You wouldn’t believe your eyes when you see this, these guys have built a DIY “eye” controller for the NES, controlling Mario with the movement of their eyes. Certainly, this seems to be going in the right direction and could be a great way to develop it for other applications such as wheelchair controller.
What’s next? Control a car with your eyes? That does seem practical actually for lazy driving from San Francisco to LA on I5.
Electrodes placed on the face around the eyes feed a small electrical signal into isolation and analog input circuitry that was custom built on an NI Singleboard RIO daughter card. All processing is done on the NI Singleboard RIO and information is passed back out digitally to the daughter card which communicates with an original Nintendo Entertainment System.
Electrodes are used to detect very small electrical signals that occur inside of the eye. The Waterloo Labs team used Ambu Blue Sensor N wet electrodes. By using a wet electrode a conductive material is used to drop the electrical resistance of the skin and allows for better electrical conduction.
These electrodes are placed around the eye in a diamond pattern to detect its current position using electrooculography. The voltage differences between the horizontal and vertical pairs are taken to determine eye position. Additionally a ground reference electrode is applied to the neck. This reference is used to filter out any base biological electrical activity not related to eye position.
