Medical News

In case you were wondering, I'll try anything once. Here I am at the Society for Neuroscience conference a few weeks back in DC wearing EyeSeeCam, a novel head-mounted camera controlled by the user's eye movements. It allows, for the first time, to literally see the world through somebody else’s eyes.

A mobile eye tracker system continuously directs the camera towards the user's point of gaze, so that the camera captures exactly what the user’s eyes see. The idea to image such a subjective view is not new – it has a long tradition, for example, in the movie-making industry. Movies like ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ (1931) and, more recently, ‘Being John Malkovich’ (1999) contain sequences of so-called point-of-view shots. EyeSeeCam takes this technique a major step further; it accurately captures the highly dynamic retinal content of the user’s visual exploration.

EyeSeeCam is based on the combination of two technologies: an eye tracking and a camera motion device that operates as an artificial eye. The challenges in designing such a system are mobility, high bandwidth, and low total latency. These challenges are met by a newly developed lightweight eye tracker that is able to synchronously measure binocular eye positions at up to 600 Hertz. The camera motion device consists of a parallel kinematics setup with a backlash-free gimbal joint that is driven by piezo actuators with no reduction gears. As a result, the latency between eye rotations and the camera is as low as 10 milliseconds.

EyeSeeCam provides a new tool for fundamental studies in vision research, particularly, on human gaze behavior in the real world. This prototype is a first attempt to combine free user mobility with biological image stabilization and unrestricted exploration of the visual surround in a man-made technical vision system.

I wore it all around the exhibition floor and as you might imagine ended up in quite a few interesting conversations. Upon analyzing the video it became apparent that I'm a fan of people's ears and shoes. Go figure.

Benedict Carey at the NYTimes writes an entertaining piece today, While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks, which dives deeper into a recent article published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that highlights how magicians "take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality."

One great illusion explained in the article revolves around how our visual cortex processes stimuli has is seen in this trick by the Great Tomsoni. "The magician has an assistant appear on stage in a white dress and tells the audience he will magically change the color of her dress to red. He first does this by shining a red light on her, an obvious ploy that he turns into a joke. Then the red light flicks off, the house lights go on and the now the woman is unmistakably dressed in red. The secret: In the split-second after the red light goes off, the red image lingers in the audience’s brains for about 100 milliseconds, covering the image of the woman. It’s just enough time for the woman’s white dress to be stripped away, revealing a red one underneath."

The paper with many more explanations and links to video of a magician's performance can be found here.