Eye Spy: DIY Eye Tracker Project Unraveling Human Perception

— Written by Summer Eunhyung Ann —

I am Summer, a Computer Science and Neuroscience undergraduate at the University of Michigan, a part-time artist, nerd, researcher at Michigan Medicine, and an intern at Backyard Brains for the summer.

My plan is to create a do-it-yourself (DIY) eye tracker to investigate the hypothesis that humans, having evolved to focus on eyes, spend more time looking at the eyes compared to other facial features.

This eye tracker will be designed using open-source software, and my ultimate goal is to make it accessible to the general public. By developing this DIY eye tracker, the aim is to provide a tool that enables individuals to conduct their own experiments and gather data to explore the hypothesis further. After finishing this web-based app, I will continue working on more web-based applications to expound attention schema more intuitively: reaction time measurements and eye beam measurement. It is intriguing since it can help everybody understand the basic human information processing mechanism using games.