Empowering People 
with Eyewriter

For us ECPs that would be a near impossible thing to overcome and for Tony Quan - an LA based graffiti artist (also known as Tempt One), he thought the end of his career was signaled when he contracted ALS or as it is more commonly known – Lou Gehrig’s disease. All would be lost but for a group of dedicated software developers and an invention named the EyeWriter.

In 2003 Quan was diagnosed with the disease, leaving virtually every muscle in his body paralyzed except for his eyes. So Zach Lieberman of the Graffiti Research Lab and other developers started working on the EyeWriter (www.eyewriter.org) in an attempt to create low-cost, open-source hardware and software for eye tracking to help Quan draw again.

As Lieberman tells NPR’s Liane Hansen, eye tracking devices usually have hefty price tags. “Commercial eye-trackers, to get a device is $10,000-$15,000," he says. The EyeWriter is estimated to cost about $50. He and his hacker colleagues have a do-it-yourself kit for building an EyeWriter that starts with a pair of sunglasses. For Lieberman’s prototype, he bought a pair from a vendor at Venice Beach.

"Then we assembled a kind of wire frame that holds a Webcam, a small camera that we've mounted close to the eye," Lieberman explains. "We've written software that tracks the eye, and then we calibrate with [Quan's] eye movements and the computer screen."
So for the cost of an iPod the artist can plot points and from that create letters, color them, extrude and shade them in many ways.

“EyeWriter is an ongoing research project from Graffiti Research Lab, a collective of artists, urban pranksters and hackers who stage multimedia interventions around the world,” says Maria Popova of Brain Pickings Newsletter. “Many of them were among Tempt's closest friends, which made his diagnosis as much a devastation as it did an inspiration to intervene through innovation. To select a tool or color, he ‘clicks’ by holding his gaze over it for four seconds.”

“He also ‘clicks’ by pausing his gaze for four seconds over the desired tool, then draws by moving his gaze around the canvas screen,” adds Maria. “Rather than saving the artwork in traditional JPG or GIF image formats, which have a number of limitations, output is saved in a GML format – Graffiti Markup Language, a new open-source format developed specifically for EyeWriter. Tempt then uploads his work to a server, from which his supporters have pulled it wirelessly to digitally project Tempt One ‘eyetags’ onto everything from high rises in Los Angeles to Tokyo's city halls to the riverbanks of Vienna.”