Last week of prototyping

Being back from a short easter holiday the final week of developing the prototype is here. The functionality of the interface is OK but there is major tweaking and bug testing to be performed. The deadline for any form of new features is Monday 31st of March. I intend to use all of April for setting up the evaluation experiments and procedures. As always there is so much more that I would like to incorporate, every day brings new ideas.

The final version will include:

• A configurable dwell button component. This enables drag and drop dwell buttons into Windows projects with individual configuration on dwell-time and icons etc.
  
  
• A novel gaze based menu system that utilized saccade selection (two step dwell) This highly configurable interface component displays itself when activated. It aims at solving the midas touch problem while utilizing the screen real estate in a better way. The two steps in the activation process can be set to specific activation-speeds (dwells) More on this later..
  
  
• A gaze-based memory game using a 36 card layout. By perfoming a dwell the cards "turn" over and shows its symbol (flag). The user the selects another card. If matching then remove them. If different, turn them back over. Got some nice graphical effects.
  
  
• A gaze based picture viewer that zooms into the photos in gaze of the user. More on this later.
  
  
• A gaze based media/music player. This component will scan the computer for artists, albums and songs. These items are then accessible by a gaze driven interface where the user can create play-lists and perform the usual functions (volume+-, pause, stop, next, previous etc.)
  
  
• Perhaps just one little surprise more..
  

Eight weeks so far. Curiosity, dedication and plain ol´ hard work, nothing else to it.

GazeMemory v0.1a on its way

The extra time spent on developing the Custom Controls for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) paid off. What before that took days to develop can now be build within hours. Today I put together a gaze version of the classic game Memory which is controlled by dwell-time (prologed fixation) The "table" contains 36 cards, i.e 18 unique options. By fixating on one card a smooth animation will make the globe on the front of the card to light up and after fixating long enough (500ms) if will show the symbol (flags in first version) After selecting the fist card another is fixated and the two will be compared. If they contain the same symbols then remove them from the table. If not, turn them back over again. The interface provides several feedback mechanisms. Upon glancing the border around the buttons begins to shine, when fixating long enough the dwell time function is activated and illustrated by a white glow that smoothly fades up surrounding the globe.

The Custom Control that will be named GazeButton is to be further developed to support more features such as a configurable dwell-time, feedback such as animations, colors etc. The time spent will be returned tenfold when later on. I plan to release these components as open source as soon as they reach better and more stable performance (ie. production quality with documentation)

Lessons learned so far involves Dependecy properties which is very important if you'd like to develop custom controls in WPF. Animation control and triggers and getting more into DataBinding which looks very promising so far.

Links:
Recommended guidelines for WPF custom controls
Three ways to build an image button
Karl on WPF

Screenshot of the second prototype of the my GazeMemory game