Many digital eyes and ears are on us as we go about our daily lives. Surveillance cameras watch us on the road and smart devices listen in on us homeour
What if some of that tracking happened through an expressive simulationof the human eye?
Researcher Marc Teyssier undertook to create such a device, giving synthetic flesh to a webcam. He turned it into a moving eye, with eyebrows and eyelashes. So we have the Eyecam.
You can see the camera in action in the following video, which gives us the impetus to use our imagination:
Imagine Eyecam waking up on its own.
Imagine Eyecam watching you every step of the way.
Imagine that Eyecam is always there όταν even when you do not want it to be there!
If you can get over the creepy idea, it's just a device. Seeing people in the video carrying an eye on their palms is certainly not the best.
The project is part of an investigation into Saarland University Human-Computer Interaction Lab, and explores very interesting questions. How would we interact with our devices if they were more human? How would our behaviors change if surveillance seemed much more tangible?
If you want to create your own partner, Eyecam design and software are available at Github and Marc Teyssier promises a complete step-by-step video for its construction. More details are available at Teyssier website, along with tons of pictures from every stage of it procedureof construction.
