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Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
Yesterday I finally met in person with Anthony Hornoff, one of a team of researchers at the University of Oregon developing systems for eye movement research. He was in the New York area for a conference on Naval systems for visual and auditory interfaces and came by my studio to talk about ideas. One of the projects of particular interest to me was their project called EyeMusic, which is a system that links data from a commercial eye tracker (the EyeGaze system) to Max/MSP. I used one of the Max/MSP objects they developed, eyedata2, in a sonification project recently, and it has become the inspiration for what will be a suite of sonification objects that I will develop with help from computer programmer and sound artist Kurt Ralske.
Anthony told me about some of his team's projects in development and he and I brainstormed ideas about how sonification can be used to help in data understanding. He told me about museum work with eye tracking done by David Wooding in the UK, a particularly interesting project called 'Telling Time' at the National Gallery in 2000/2001 <http://ibs.derby.ac.uk/gallery/background.shtml>
Wooding's project was to my knowledge, the largest successful public eye tracking installation. What interests me about this work is that in my own work with eye tracking systems, I found the calibration setup to be too cumbersome for an effective public installation. Before an eye tracking performance, I would have to spend ten minutes or more calibrating the system and the lighting for the most accurate tracking. By using an infra-red eye tracking system that analyzes reflections from the eye instead of the simple video tracking system I used that analyzes the location of the pupil through color tracking, Wooding's team was able to reduce the time needed for calibration of the system considerably. There were limitations of the system of course, for example the system could not track the eyes of someone wearing glasses, but by looking through an eyepiece, calibration was simple and fast and collected data from over 5000 participants.
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