Chris Sugrue - Re-Gaze, Eye-responsive visualisation, 2005

Eye-tracking based interaction.
Re-Gaze is an installation art work that explores this relationship between vision and technology. In developing the work, I wanted to create an engaging interactive and unique visual experience that was revealing about the process of seeing. In the installation, a viewer looks through an antique viewfinder at an LCD display. A short calibration sequence adjusts to the eye and images begin to appear and react to points of focus. At times images take form as a result of the moving eye. As the eye moves about the page, points around the fixation of the eye move to form an images. In order to uncover an entire image, the eye cannot concentrate on the parts being formed, but must move about. At other times, visual fixations distort images, breaking them apart according to the directional movement of the viewers gaze. Behind each participant, a projection reveals only the area being looked at. Spectators in the gallery can watch the process of the eye jumping and the images revealed as if under spotlight or surveillance.

The interaction with the piece can be viewed as a new form of visual illusion. Images that seem to trick the eye such as the inverting Necker cube, or images that sometime appear to be a young woman and sometimes an old woman, or stereograms, all have a physical property that manipulates the human visual system to create illusions or interactions. The image does not actually change, but the way we see it does. In my work, the images respond to being seen. The changes are caused by the viewer, and it is the interaction with the image, the visual process, that changes the way the images are seen.

Technology aside, vision is an amazing and powerful process. It is an experience we are familiar with, but, at the same time, is somewhat hidden. Very often vision is an involuntary process that is so active we cannot be constantly conscious of it. The ability to reveal that process through technology opens up possibilities to explore the public and private aspects of the visual process, and finds new ways to understand and experience seeing.
More info:
http://www.setpixel.com/content/?ID=regaze

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• interactive
• art
• eye
• tracking
• vison
• technology