They’re looking to be increasingly more interesting as a biomarker for MS among other things [0]. There’s a lot we still don’t know about our visual systems and the advent of lower cost hardware is allowing huge amount of interesting questions to be hypothesized and tested. It’s a great time to be in the science behind all of this, like the authors at Brown on this paper!
Here’s an old school high level overview of pupil tracking methods[0]. The focus recently has been moving these older computer vision methodologies to ML without introducing too many errors.
There’s two parts to that implementation of such a system, and they’re both interesting! The first part is detection of a micro saccade which is already available in research systems I have personally worked on. You can basically crank up the camera frame rate until you’re around the micro saccade range and do some clustering analysis on the positional data to decouple the hardware moving vs the face. The second part is having a fast enough reliable commercial grade displa system to present stimulus on. Displays are very fickle in practice and getting your hands on one that can run with adequate color, contrast, and brightness at speed is currently very difficult. One angle under research currently is the perception of stimulus during saccades and micro saccades. There’s quite a bit of time and effort in the industry going into neurological assessments through saccades, the tools coming out of this are really starting to come down in price. This opens the door for a bunch of lower priced research options, such as the parent article, to enable a much more rapid pace of understanding.
Disclaimer, I am the primary engineer of a commercial eye tracking system.
Tools like these popup every now and then are a nice tool for rough estimation of gaze. Fixation tracking is a large complicated issue that usually requires some sort of calibration to get more precise results. By sidestepping the calibration problem, much higher subject compliance can be achieved since you don't have a grad student barking confusing order at you. The downside to this is the noise you see in the tracking results. For those interested a product that produces similar results is
pupil labs ambient gaze tracking "Core" research headset[0].
[0] https://pupil-labs.com/products/core/
This is one area when the functionally can really be improved over what reddit implements. Having a moving window of time to sort within is an amazingly useful feature for sorting out trends or lost articles. The expanded granularity would be very much appreciated.
Most important piece of code I wrote controls the delivery of electrical stimulation for a nervous systems stimulation system that goes in people. Second place is a human metrology system that diagnoses eye issues in a lot of clinical settings.
Texas Biomedical Device Center | ONSITE in Dallas, TX | C/C++ developer
The Texas Biomedical Device Center is the Biomedical research commercialization center for the University of Texas at Dallas. We're looking for a good C/C++ programmer that has experience with embedded products and debugging on hardware. Experience with ISM wireless bands is preferred and experience with any ARM cortex is even better. If you want to apply send your resume to [email protected]!
Solid point. Maybe just a cheap wide angle lens from ebay and use easy off the shelf background subtraction from opencv at a low frequency as an easy of motion detection. I'm trying to think of ways to avoid integrating external peripherals that aren't part of the phone.
It would be really cool to add facial recognition at like 0.5hz to the phone so that it only turns the screen on when you're looking at it. Or alternatively customize the content based on who's present in front of the mirror.
Texas Biomedical Device Center | Dallas, Tx | http://www.utdallas.edu/txbdc/ | Full-Time / Part-Time | ONSITE or REMOTE
We are a biomedical research commercialization center for spinning out biomedical research from the University of Texas at Dallas. We're a small, well funded team working on a ton of fascinating projects.
What we're currently hiring for:
Embedded Programmer - ARM Cortex M3 programmer with previous experience on wireless connectivity (bluetooth and zigbee preferred!).
Local is preferred but we can swing some remote work as well.
I've had some mixed success with Raspberry Pi's spontaneously failing as well. This is perfect opportunity for a dual or triple redundancy lockstep MCU to take the place of the Raspberry Pi.
Tax incentives, lower cost of living, and pro business local governments are driving larger companies to relocate headquarters or major research ops to Texas en-mass.