Students at London's Imperial College last week announced that they had developed a prototype system that could make it possible for severely disabled individuals to play video games for the first time.
The students demonstrated their system with a copy of Pong, showing that it was possible to move the bat up and down the screen using eye movement alone. The school said that "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."
Infrared lights and web cameras were among the technologies used to construct the system, which looks very much like a pair of glasses with sensors on the end of small metal limbs looking back at the user.
Gaming blog Kotaku noted that, in addition to the undoubted utility of the project, the students constructed their prototype rig for about £25, whereas comparable hand-and-eye movement-tracking devices used by scientists cost more than a thousand times as much.
The technology could also be used in the classroom, perhaps to help disabled students make presentations on an overhead projector, experts say.
