Eyeballs For Good and Evil

Eyes are cool things. They let you see, experience and do things that would be pretty difficult otherwise. I know that’s a strange theme for a blog post but bear with me. I’ve come across these two projects recently and I thought it was an interesting dichotomy.

The first story is an inspirational one. It's about using eyes to communicate when there are no other options. It centers around a graffiti artist known as Tempt who has lost all movement due to advanced stage Lou Gehrig’s Disease. His only communication method was an eye tracking system that cost nearly $1500 dollars and simply didn’t work all that well. A group of artists and programmers decided they could do better and made a system for about $50, using off the shelf components and open source software. The resulting system is both amazing and inspiring- I can only imagine what these guys felt watching Tempt virtually tag his name for the first time in years. The video is 5 minutes but absolutely worth it- Pure bliss.

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

The second story is the scary side of eyes. A company called Global Rainmakers Inc. (which sounds more like a rap group than a biometrics company) has announced that they will be installing eye scanners in the Mexican city of Leon. Like the first story, this is a new generation of technology. These are iris scanners that will eventually be able to scan and confirm your identity from hundreds of feet away while you are walking down the street and the prices are expected to come down to the $50-$100 dollar range per scanner. The scariest quote from the story is related to not joining the iris database “ When you get masses of people opting-in, opting out does not help. Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system. We believe everyone will opt-in”.