Author Archives: Craig Hennessey

Water Vapor Display

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In early 2013 I discovered pico-projectors. I picked up a relatively inexpensive one (Microvision SHOWWX+ with HDMI input), which sadly can no longer be purchased! It was an incredible piece of technology, which is/was ahead of its time. The first application I came up with it was to create a water vapor display. Basically, generate water vapor (fog), blow it into a curtain with laminar flow, and project an image on it. I created a manifold of about 20 channels, with two plastic bag air-resevoirs (to 'still' the air), pressurized by 2 CPU fans. The manifold had a gap at the based through which water vapor could be sucked up and lifted into a curtain. After building the whole thing, well, it didn't really work. I couldn't get enough fog up into a curtain.

My Unsuccessful Vapor Display

Successful Vapor Displays

Fog Screen 1.0 from finkbuilt on Vimeo.

PETMEI 2014

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I will be attending the 4th International Workshop on Pervasive Eye Tracking and Mobile Eye-Based Interaction in Seattle on September the 13th, 2014. We tried very hard to get a paper done in time for the conference but we were just too swamped with everything else on the go. So instead I might just bring down one of our custom head mounted eye-gaze tracking system we’ve been working on to demo instead.

Let me know if you are coming too, looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Cheers,

Craig

EECE496 Term Project

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The UBC EECE 496 capstone engineering team did an amazing job developing an innovative new video game which uses the player’s eye-gaze information as a core game dynamic, called Focalpoint. Focalpoint is one of the first, if not the first game which uses eye-gaze as a native game dynamic (and not just a mouse cursor or touch replacement). It’s a simple game, but once you start playing, you forget about the eye-tracking and it feels like the computer just knows what you want it to do, without having to click anywhere.

HCI Group back in action

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The HCI Group has been quiet the last few years as I have been very busy focusing on entrepreneurship while my academic activities as Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia took a back seat. I am very happy to announce that I am finally able to restart the HCI Group and all related activities based on my new tenure at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

As always, the focus of the HCI Group is on human-computer interaction with an emphasis on eye-gaze tracking. However, in addition to HCI, the HCI Group has partnered with the research group of Dr. Julie Robillard, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia and will be assisting on the technical side with the research in Neuroscience and Scientific Communication.

Stay tuned for more!

Craig Hennessey