Senior computer and information science major Anna Cavender sits at a computer in a small room, her hands wrapped around her waist, her posture straight but relaxed. She waits while the machine calibrates and begins drawing a house on the screen, adding a chimney, a window and trees.
But Cavender’s hands never leave her hips; she draws the house using only her eyes.
Cavender was demonstrating new software dubbed EyeDraw that she and recent University graduate Rob Hoselton recently developed. The software is designed to allow children with severe motor impairments to draw smoothly using eye trackers. A sensor is mounted beneath the computer monitor to detect eye movements and analyze them, thus creating hands-free control.
As a result of her work on the EyeDraw project, the Computing Research Association named Cavender as North America’s 2004 Outstanding Female Undergraduate in Computer Science and Engineering. CRA is an association of more than 200 computer science and engineering academic departments, laboratories, centers in industry, government and academia that are engaged in basic computing research, according to http://www.cra.org.
Cavender will receive a $1,000 cash prize at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which will be held this October in Chicago The EyeDraw software will be unveiled Wednesday in Vienna at CHI2004, billed as a premier international conference for computer-human interaction.
Cavender and Hoselton conducted the research for the software in the University’s cognitive modeling and eye-tracking lab. Although real-time eye tracking has been linked to controlling computers before, Cavender said this is the first time eye trackers have been able to draw without scribbles, which have been the result of the eye’s natural movement.
“This is one of the first applications where we’ve been able to control the decision between drawing and not drawing.” Hoselton said.
During previous attempts to draw with the eye, Hoselton said drawing occurred wherever the user looked on the screen, which posed a technical problem referred to as the “Midas touch problem.” Cavender said this problem happens when the eye tracker has no concept of “pen up or pen down.” Pixels are drawn wherever the user looks on the screen, leaving the user without real control over the drawing.
However, Hoselton and Cavender found a way to give users more control by enabling the eye tracker to distinguish between intentional drawing and simple gazing.
“We’re taking data from the eye tracker into the (EyeDraw) program in the form of x-y coordinates, and manipulating that data to optically draw pictures,” Cavender said. “We use smoothing algorithms so that the jerky nature of eye movements doesn’t appear on the screen.”
Hoselton and Cavender said the process of development was methodical but went abnormally fast because they were so excited by the research.
“Just the initial steps of learning how to get the eye data into the Windows environment took one to two months; from there we were able to expand to clicking on buttons, drawing simple lines, choosing points on the screen and it just kind of evolved from there,” Hoselton said. “The project was so fun we couldn’t stay away from it.”
Hoselton said that although preliminary tests of EyeDraw with non-disabled users have shown that the skill can be mastered in two to three minutes, it was designed to give disabled children the ability to express themselves through drawing and develop their own creativity.
“I would just like to see our users just enjoy having the experience of joy of doing the same tasks that normal or typically developed children do,” he said.
Assistant Professor of computer and information science Anthony Hornof oversaw the research and nominated Cavender for the CRA award.
“Anna’s work in the field of human-computer interaction opens up the creative and scientific world to those who have been locked out,” he said.
Hornof said initial tests by users have shown the possibilities of such software, which could be used by all types of disabled users and average consumers alike.
“We had a guy from IBM suggesting that there should be an eye tracker on every laptop,” Hornof said.