EyeJam
Official Microsoft name: Microsoft Hands Free Sound Jam
Eyejam is an open-source eye-controlled music composition environment. This was developed during for my summer internship with the Enable Group at Microsoft Research. The source code can be found on github under the official project name Microsoft Hands-Free Sound Jam.
EyeJam is cross-platform, with suport for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Eye-control is only available on Windows. On the other platforms, eye control is simulated using the mouse cursor.
EyeJam uses a set of cross-platform libaries that I've used on previous projects.
These libraries include:
- Soundpipe for sound synthesis and DSP
- RtAudio for cross-platform realtime audio
- NanoVG for graphics via GLFW
- SQLite for saving/loading capabilites
About
The core motivation for building Eyejam was to design a novel musical interface for musicians with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly refered to as ALS. People with ALS slowly lose their ability to voluntarily control their muscles. One of the last things they are able to control is their eyes. For this reason, eye tracking has been a very popular means for communication and interaction in the ALS community.
EyeJam is a live performance and music composition environment which revolves around eye-control. It uses hardware made by Tobii for eyetracking. The core means of interaction is known as dwelling, which involves looking at a particular UI elements such as buttons for a period of time to simulate a mouse click event.
The design of EyeJam is highly inspired by paradigms established in commercial digital audio workstations. EyeJam implements a programmable clip launcher based off of the one found in Ableton Live.
Usage
Documentation for EyeJam can be found in the documentation included in the source code
Video Demos
The following videos below contain video walkthroughs for how to compose with EyeJam using the built-in clip step editor.