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.