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Certainly one of the most emotionally moving lectures at SXSW 2010 was Open Frameworks: A Powerful Creative Coding Library for Artists presented by Zach Lieberman (creater of OF) and Todd Vanderlin.

As a part of their presentation they spoke about a project where they use OF to point lasers at buildings to create graffiti out of light. As an extension of this innovative technique, they decided to share the process with Tony Quan, aka Tempt One, a seminal graffiti artist who also suffers from the advanced stages of ALS. He needs a breathing machine to breathe and he only retains movement of his eyes. While the team was in the hospital room sharing the technology with Tony, he commented "dude my hardware is so ghetto" using an advanced eye-tracking system that allows him to communicate with others at his bedside.

The creative graffiti team began thinking, if they could use a laser to guide graffiti strokes, why couldn't they use the eye? They then set to work on creating an eye-tracking drawing program that allows paraplegics to draw art with their eyes. The project is open source, built on OF, and only requires a $50 eye-tracking kit attached to a PC (Tony's old system cost 15K and he couldn't draw with it).

When Tony began using the system, he replied "I haven't drawn anything since 2003, this feels like breathing again after being held underwater for 5 minutes."

Tempt One's image page (each tag is automatically uploaded)

EyeWriter Initiative