SlitherSight

Inspiration

This project started with a simple question: What if you could play a game using only your eyes?

Most games assume players can use their hands — a keyboard, controller, touchscreen, or mouse. For many people with cerebral palsy, those assumptions create unnecessary barriers. We wanted to design something that removes those barriers entirely.

The myth of Medusa inspired our theme. In mythology, a gaze turns you to stone. We flipped that idea — what if your gaze was your power? Instead of freezing you, it lets you move, escape, and play.

What it does

Slither by Sight is a gaze-controlled snake game. Players guide a snake left and right using only pupil movement to escape danger. You need to avoid the stones in order to stay alive. Gold coins give you x2 points! The game runs entirely in the browser using your webcam, and all processing happens locally.

How it works

We used WebGazer.js, an open-source library from Brown University. It accesses the webcam and runs a TensorFlow FaceMesh model directly in the browser. FaceMesh detects 468 facial landmarks per frame, isolates the eye regions, and estimates pupil position. A ridge regression model then maps pupil coordinates to screen coordinates in real time.

To reduce jitter, we implemented a sliding window smoother that averages the last 8 readings. This significantly stabilizes movement while keeping the controls responsive.

Before playing, users complete a 9-point calibration. During calibration, we detected eye dominance by measuring directional gaze bias, where a consistent shift to one side indicates whether a player is right- or left-eye dominant. If that bias exceeds a set threshold, the game widens the trigger zone on the harder-to-reach side to ensure balanced and accessible lane switching.

Built With

• css
• html5
• javascript