Your Eye's Motion by LUNA is an exploration of human perception through robotic motion. The interactive installation uses the position of your eye and the direction of gaze as an input for controlling a small robotic arm situated inside an enclosed environment. Materializing eye movements through a wondrous spectacle of light, motion and color, the observer becomes conscious of her gaze enacted and extended by a robotic counterpart. Building on a diverse set of theories and understandings of vision from the fields of cybernetics, visual studies, embodied mind and more, the project uncovers the embodied and affective potential of eye movement as an interface for robotics. The curiosity of LUNA stems from this potential, articulating a unity between our embodied percepts and machinic environments to create “vision machines.”
Robotic Art Installation
Custom manufactured aluminum kinetic robot, custom software, servo motors, electronics, computer, dichroic viewing instrument, eye tracker
Exhibited
Ugly Duck, Anamorphic Waves, 2019
Grow Hackney, Sense 4: Perception, 2019
UCL Project Fair, 2019
Published
Siggraph ACM, 2021: Instruments of Vision: Eye-Tracking and Robotics as an Embodied Interface - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3465618
Digital Futures, 2020
Process sketches, diagrams, 3D renders, and an early robot arm prototype.
Eye-Tracking Development
We initially started using gaze tracking to get the direction of eyes through the webcam. In the second iteration switched to using an IR camera to detect the position of the pupil. For the final iteration we switched to Tobii eye tracking to obtain the most robust results.