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Eye-popping illusion lets you write with gaze alone

an innovation that could benefit the disabled, a French researcher finds a to trick the eyes into moving more smoothly so they can be like a pencil to write cursive.

Last month, a paralyzed man sent his first tweet using movements. A new technology out of France could allow him not to type, but to draw and sign his name in cursive a computer.

The technique, described the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, relies on a novel -mounted display that uses a camera to track eye movements and then relays that movement data a computer.

Discovered a Paris scientist studying optical illusions, the technique tricks the neuromuscular machinery overcoming a natural phenomenon known saccadic eye movements.

Try moving your gaze smoothly across a fixed object. Notice eyes subtly jumping from one point to ? They're "saccading," a movement that would hinder eye writing in much the way a shaky hand would interfere with handwriting.

To counteract saccades, Jean Lorenceau of Universite Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris created a temporally modulated visual display a flickering screen that tricks the brain into thinking the eyes following a moving object.

"We show that one can gain complete, voluntary control smooth pursuit eye movements," Lorenceau says. "The discovery also provides a tool to use smooth pursuit movements as a pencil to draw, write, or generate a signature."

Lorenceau says it only a few brief training sessions to teach subjects to produce legible scripts, such as pictured, on a computer screen at a rate of 20-30 characters minute.

Lorenceau is currently working a better version of his eye writer, and says tests with Lou Gehrig's disease (also as ALS) patients should start next year.

Of course, there are potential consumers of this technology, including gamers, and writers, like yours truly, who tend to gesticulate while thinking their prose.


Adapted from: CNET, July 26, 2012.