The world needs more thinkers and tinkerers like Hiroyuki Manabe, who wants to find the next great phone interface, via Wired:

Manabe wired a pair of headphones to a system that detects the electrical currents produced by the rapid movement of his eyeballs. The invention is so precise that he can actually turn up the volume on a music player by rolling his eyes up or down, and he can fast forward tracks with a couple of quick eye jerks to his right.

This type of eye-powered interface could also be helpful to the disabled. Although the prototype looks ridiculous and needs serious fashion tweaking, I’d like to see more eye-powered devices.

Could be a few problems though if it tied too much activity to blinking as we tend to blink our eyes a lot of times every day. If it’s 16 times a minute, or 15,360 times over the course of 16 hours (hey, we have to sleep the other 8, right?), that’s a whole lot of unintentional activity. I’m lucky if I consciously think about blinking once a day, never mind over 15,000 times.

But you could do some sort of switch for closing your eyes and keeping them closed for a period of time. Close eyes and hold for five seconds to play Metallica "Enter Sandman" for example.

Here I have these glasses on every day, why can’t I get an eye-powered or eye-enhanced set of glasses that help me multi-task easier? Such a contraption might border on looking like some Borg apparatus and make even Manabe’s headphones look cool.

How about using our eyes to control a 3D viewer like PicLens (left) someday? Is Piclens neat browser eye candy or a glimpse at the future?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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