Your eyeballs can be game controllers

Believe it or not, you can control a video game with your eyeballs.

By moving your eyes one way or another, you can generate controls for a game or other applications.

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Chris Culver and Hunter Smith of National Instruments’ Waterloo Labs division showed how they could control a simple game by moving their eyes in one direction or another. The demo was just for fun, but it shows that games might be made even more realistic by giving players one more way to control the action. It represents one more step in the march toward more natural man-machine interfaces for games, in addition to things like Microsoft‘s Kinect motion-control system and the Nintendo Wii.

This is one of the cool concepts I saw today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It was tucked away in the Analog Devices meeting room. But now that the researchers have figured out how to do it, somebody else might want to figure out if there’s a point in doing it.

National Instruments showed off a relatively simple hardware design where sensors were wired to Culver’s eyes. They detected which way he was moving his eyes and translated that into controls. As you can see from the video below, they created a Whack-A-Mole game in which Culver used the eye controls to smash the moles down.