An EyeTap is a device that is worn in front of the eye

Human eye

The human eye is an organ which reacts to light for several purposes. As a conscious sense organ, the eye allows vision. Rod and cone cells in the retina allow conscious light perception and vision including color differentiation and the perception of depth...

 that acts as a camera

Camera

A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...

 to record the scene available to the eye as well as a display to superimpose a computer-generated imagery on the original scene available to the eye.

In order to capture what the eye is seeing as accurately as possible, an EyeTap uses a beam splitter

Beam splitter

A beam splitter is an optical device that splits a beam of light in two. It is the crucial part of most interferometers.In its most common form, a rectangle, it is made from two triangular glass prisms which are glued together at their base using Canada balsam...

 to send the same scene (with reduced intensity) to both the eye and a camera. The camera then digitizes the reflected image of the scene and sends it to a computer. The computer processes the image and then sends it to a projector. The projector sends the image to the other side of the beam splitter so that this computer-generated image is reflected into the eye to be superimposed on the original scene. Stereo EyeTaps modify light passing through both eyes, but many research prototypes (mainly for reasons of ease of construction) only tap one eye.

EyeTap is also the name of an organization founded by inventor Steve Mann

Steve Mann

Steven Mann , is a tenured professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto.-Education:...

 to develop and promote EyeTap-related technologies such as wearable computing.

Possible uses

An EyeTap is somewhat like a head-up display

Head-Up Display

A head-up display or heads-up display is any transparent display that presents data without requiring users to look away from their usual viewpoints...

. The important difference is that the scene available to the eye is also available, now, to the computer that projects the head-up display. This enables the EyeTap to modify the computer generated scene in response to the natural scene. One use, for instance, would be a sports EyeTap: here the wearer, while in a stadium, would be able to follow a particular player in a field and have the EyeTap display statistics relevant to that player as a floating box above the player. The EyeTap Criteria are an attempt to define how close a real, practical device comes to such an ideal. EyeTaps could have great use in any field where the user would benefit from real-time interactive information that is largely visual in nature. This is sometimes referred to as computer-mediated reality, commonly known as augmented reality

Augmented reality

Augmented reality is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is...

.

Eyetap has been explored as a potential tool for individuals with visual disabilities due to its abilities to direct visual information to parts of the retina that function well. As well, Eyetap's role in sousveillance

Sousveillance

Sousveillance refers to the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies.Sousveillance has also been described as "inverse surveillance", i.e...

 has been explored by Mann, Jason Nolan and Barry Wellman

Barry Wellman

Barry Wellman, FRSC directs NetLab as the S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His areas of research are community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations...

Principle of operation

A conceptual diagram of an EyeTap; in this case, the EyeTap views infrared light.

External links

• http://www.eyetap.org/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01/15/captain_cyborg_faces_canadian_challenge/
• http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Part+Everyone+watching/1253557/story.html
• http://www.vision-systems.com/display_article/310743/19/none/none/TECHN/GPUs-battle-for-imaging-applications