Gaming for the disabled….PONG enables play with eyes!

This is one invention that could revolutionize the gaming world and will enable even the disabled enjoy the gaming experience. Students, from Imperial College London (ICL), have developed an open source game called ‘Pong’, where a player uses his eye to move a bat to hit a ball as it bounces around the screen.

To play the game, the user needs to wear special glasses that contain an infrared light and a webcam that records the movement of one eye. The webcam is linked to a laptop where a computer programme syncs the player’s eye movements to the game. The students believe that the technology behind the game could be adapted to create more sophisticated games and applications such as wheelchairs and computer cursors controlled by eye movements.

The most remarkable about the effort is that the technology built in this experiment costs just £25 (US$37). Current eye and brain tracking setups cost more than 1,000 times that much, though we’d hope they’re more elaborate.

Researchers are now refining the technology so that it can monitor movements in both eyes. This would enable a user to carry out more complicated tasks such as plotting a journey on screen. This might ultimately allow them to use eye movements to steer a motorised wheelchair.