Eye-movement game targets disabled

The students have adapted an open-source game called ’Pong’, where a player moves a bat to hit a ball as it bounces around the screen. The adaptation enables the player to move the bat using their eye.

To play the game, the user wears glasses containing an infrared light and a webcam that records the movement of one eye. The webcam is linked to a laptop where a computer program synchronises the player’s eye movements to the game.

The prototype game is very simple but the students believe that the technology behind it could be adapted to create more sophisticated games and applications such as wheelchairs and computer cursors controlled by eye movements.

The technology was developed using off-the-shelf hardware and cost approximately £25 to make. Eye-movement systems that scientists currently use to study the brain and eye motion cost around £27,000, said the researchers.

Dr Aldo Faisal, the team’s supervisor from the Department of Computing and the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, said: ‘Remarkably, our undergraduates have created this piece of neurotechnology using bits of kit that you can buy in a shop, such as webcams. The game that they’ve developed is quite simple, but we think it has enormous potential, particularly because it doesn’t need lots of expensive equipment.