You can now paint with just your eyes. Yes, without the help of any limbs you can now draw anything in your imagination's indulgence just by looking at it. A new robot developed by British researchers at Imperial College in London can enable you to draw just by eye stimulation, tracking your eyesight sends the robotic arm into a drawing frenzy. This revolutionary discovery is going to be a big help for the future, such as having an extra pair of hands to multi task and assisting risky brain surgeries.
Dr Aldo Faisal, the head of the research related how they came up with the idea. "Six years ago we started to look at eye movements. It's a very natural, intuitive means by which we can operate devices," he said. "And so over the course of the years we developed systems that decode our intention of action from our eye movements."
The process of perceiving first an object before taking any action towards it gave them an idea that could be used in the project. Math and the process of simple tasks such as picking a cup contain a lot of data that is calculated by the brain. The depth, width, texture and even temperature, all so we can act ourselves on how to take action into just picking up a simple cup.
Dr Faisal related their step-by-step procedure can determine the intention from the eye holder into actual movements. To make the experiment possible, they use a robotic hand, empowered with a tracker to detect eye movement and its line of sight instead of a set of commands pre-programmed into its system.
On Oct. 14, Sabine Dziemian, a postgraduate student, gave its first demonstration of painting while eating. The commands she did with the use of her eyes included her colour choices by just simply directing her eyes to the colour she wanted then blinked for the command to be accepted. The robotic arm dipped into her chosen colour and started to paint. To change commands, she just looked at another colour and blinked three times. The whole experiment demonstrated how revolutionary and helpful this invention would be in the future.
