Student Develops Innovative Software
From: Oregon Daily Emerald - 04/26/2004
By: Steven Neuman

University of Oregon senior Anna Cavender was named North America's 2004
Outstanding Female Undergraduate in Computer Science and Engineering by the
Computing Research Association for her work on EyeDraw, a computer program
co-created with recent graduate Rob Hoselton. EyeDraw was designed primarily
as a tool that movement-disabled children can use to express themselves and
refine their creative talent through drawing. The software uses an eye
tracker positioned beneath the computer monitor to recognize and analyze the
user's eye movements, allowing users to draw pictures without their hands.
Cavender notes that these drawings can be made free of scribbling, which is
attributed to previous eye trackers' inability to distinguish between
intentional drawing and simple gazing. "We're taking data from the eye
tracker into the [EyeDraw] program in the form of x-y coordinates, and
manipulating that data to optically draw pictures," notes Cavender. "We use
smoothing algorithms so that the jerky nature of eye movements doesn't appear
on the screen." Cavender and Hoselton carried out the research for the
software in the University of Oregon's cognitive modeling and eye-tracking
lab. 

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