Head-controlled autozoom

I've got this idea today and I want to try. I wonder if it's been done already or not (by the Simpsons maybe?). I am getting older and I want to see large texts on computer screens. I want to automate that, with a sonic ranger! Here is what I will do.

Any suggestions?

Are you wanting to zoom the whole screen, a section of the screen, a window...? Any one of those will likely involve tracking the user's focus; I'm not sure how you could easily do that with just an Arduino (and it wouldn't be that easy even if you used some other method connected to the PC - like perhaps, a webcam with an IR light source to track the eyeballs and gaze and somehow triangulate that back to a spot on the screen as the "interesting" spot being gazed at to zoom into)...

Good luck - it sounds like a neat project, and if it hasn't been done, I am sure if you are able to get it to work, you could easily sell such a product for those like yourself and others with eyesight problems...

:slight_smile:

What we need is eyeglasses with variable focal lens plus a proximity sensor /arduino, would be could. Just sayin'

Thanks cr0sh. I will explore more into this idea. Maybe turn off screen if no one is around like screen protector.

Probably not doable with an Arduino, but this looks similar to those eye-controlled keyboards/speech synths they make for quadraplegics and people with advanced debilitating diseases.

I've also seen something like that on some science-channel documentary about psychologists determining what interested viewers of a video. I'm pretty sure that they did it with real-time analysis of an image of the viewer's eye.

Thanks Ran. Now I'm thinking using that sonic ranger to auto-adjust music volumn. The energy of sound decreases as square of distance so if I want the same volumn I can increase volumn as distance. Maybe nice maybe crappy. I just can't sit on this idea and do nothing ;D

Liudr, this sort of reminds of that a TED video I saw about a guy hacking the wii IR camera/controller. One of his experiments was attaching some IR lights to safety glasses and using that as a head tracking headset - and here's the cool part - he used it in some software that moved the perspective of a 3d image in such a way that it made the illusion that it was actually 3d (looked realistic too).

Here's the vid:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html

I bet it cold be done with most of the work being done on the machine side. I've accidentally launched a zoom type window around my mouse on my Windows and Linux machines. I bet it's an accessibility option under a hot key.

PING located by webcam,
PING checked every 2 seconds by Arduino,
If clearance in front of the machine drops under 18" send a "ZOOM" request to the serial port,
Insert fancy computer programming here that listens to the serial port and makes the ZOOM happen,
If clearance in front of the machine is greater than 48" bump volume up a bit.
If the statements become false back out....

I would even bet that you can manipulate the properties of the zoom window to your liking (bigger, smaller, how long it lingers, etc)

That 3D wiimote hack by Johnny Lee is simply awesome!

Nice drawing btw liudr! I was thinking maybe you can triangulate with 3 ultrasonic rangefinders? One in three corners of the display. I'm not sure how well it would work though, as your head is presumably attached to something also reflecting those sound waves :stuck_out_tongue: That could probably be compensated for in the triangulation calculation somehow. But then there might be more than one person looking at the screen.

And I agree with tacoma.