Eyes of Expression

Inspiration

Art is one of the most fundamental forms of human expression. Through art we mirror the beauty of the world around us, engage in ages old cultural tradition, and express emotions that words just can't. Unfortunately, people with motor disabilities are often unable to pursue art on their own terms. This is what inspired us to make a tool to help make art more accessible for everyone, because everyone should be free to express themselves as they wish.

What it does

Eyes of Expression allows you to draw using just your eye movements. After a brief calibration phase, you can just look at where you want to move your cursor, and draw without any contact. You can change your pen size/color, toggle drawing mode, use an eraser, clear a drawing, and save past works.

How we built it

We made our website with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. For checking eye movements, we implemented EyeGestures, a computer vision model built for gaze tracking. We uploaded our code to GitHub, and deployed our website with Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

We came in knowing next to nothing about web development, so it took us a lot of time to learn everything we needed to know about web development, along with how to implement an eye tracking algorithm, and how to deploy a website. We also struggled with improving the accuracy of the eye tracker, and sifted through a variety of models to find the best performing one. We were limited by our hardware, as we didn't have access to any good cameras, which severely hindered eye tracking accuracy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of deploying an actual end product, despite starting off Bitcamp with no idea how to make a website. We're also proud of the role that Eyes of Expression can play as a proof of concept for what can be accomplished with better hardware.

What we learned

We learned a lot about all the various steps that go into front-end development, how to work with APIs, and about the world of using machine learning for gaze tracking.

What's next for Eyes of Expression

We hope to start off by running our product on better cameras to see how accurate the eye tracking can actually be. Another big step would be to change the user interface to be 100% contactless for maximum accessibility. We also want to implement a database where users can upload their drawings, and view what others users are creating!