日記で紹介したことが無かったので、ちょっと紹介。
Tony Quan, Evan Roth, Chris Sugrue,
Zach Lieberman, Theo Watson and James Powderlyによる
EyeWriterというプロジェクトです。
http://eyewriter.org — (the project site)
EyeWriterプロジェクトが始まったころ
Zacharyに話を聞いていて、面白くなりそうな
プロジェクトだなーと思っていて、
Flying Tokyoで全貌を知って深く感動したのですが、
futureeverythingのアワードに最終選考に残った様です。
(他の2つも素晴らしいプロジェクト！)
http://www.futureeverything.org/awards
EyeWriter チームからのメールを貼っておきます。
+ + + + + +
Friends and Colleagues,
Some of you may have already heard about a project we have been working on since April of 2009, called the EyeWriter Initiative. The project, which is a collaboration between the Graffiti Research Lab, OpenFrameworks, The Free Art and Technology Lab and the Ebeling Group, is focused on developing extremely low-cost, open source, creative technologies and communication tools for people with paralysis caused by neuromuscular diseases like ALS, severe brain trauma, strokes, and similar illnesses and injuries.
In 2008, we all learned about Tony Quan, a legendary LA graffiti artists, who has been living with ALS since 2003. Tony, or TemptOne as he was known in the streets, is unable to move any part of his body: he cannot talk, eat or even breathe on his own, but his mind is lucid and wide-awake. And he can still move his eyes. In 2009, 5 artists traveled from around the world to meet-up with Tony, and his friends in LA, to work together to develop a tool so he could again make art using only the movement of his eyes. After two trips to LA, supported by private contributions from Mick and Caskey Ebeling, a small budget from Parsons School of Design and our own personal resources, the EyeWriter 1.0 was created. Existing systems that enable patients with “locked-in syndrome” to communicate or control a computer with their eyes, cost ten to twenty thousand dollars. The EyeWriter costs around $50 US dollars, uses free and open source software and the hardware is completely DIY. With the EyeWriter, Tony can once again create graffiti art in his hospital bed in Alhambra, California. His artwork is saved and archived in a digital format called Graffiti Markup Language (GML). This has enabled Tony’s drawings to be uploaded to the web and recreated, sometimes in real-time as they are being drawn, all over the world, using projectors, robotic arms and laser cutters, as well as hand-painted collaborations with local graffiti writers and street artists from Japan and Norway, to NYC and Los Angeles. The project is still very new, but it has already been nominated for multiple awards, including the Design of the Year in the Interactive Art category by the Design Museum, London, and is one of three finalists for the FutureEverything Award.
“That was the first time i’ve drawn anything since 2003! It feels like taking a breath after being held underwater for 5 minutes.” –Tony Quan
The EyeWriter prototype is now complete, but more development is needed to take this creative tool and turn it into a robust communication system for people with severe paralysis. Over the past year we have spoken with numerous doctors, family members and normal people who are suffering from serious diseases and injuries. We have found out that hundreds of conditions exist which prevent people from communicating and expressing their creativity. We have discovered that the EyeWriter is a useful tool for people recovering in ICUs, individuals suffering from a variety of eye conditions and doctors in the diagnosis and treatment of illness. Starting in February of 2009, members of the EyeWriter team have begun working with a class of graduate and undergraduate design students at Parsons to improve the existing software and hardware and to develop the next version of the EyeWriter. We are working with patients, doctors and an open source community of developers, in places ranging from India to New York, to create new interfaces, applications and software to enable and empower people. While the breadth of the effort is expanding, the approach remains the same: to develop open source and free technologies with the lowest possible cost to fill the gap where traditional corporate technology development has failed.
To continue this effort we need your help, whether you are a developer interested in working on our team, an individual willing to share you experience or a patient interested in user-testing our tools. We are writing to ask you to spread the word about this effort and if you are eligible to vote in the FutureEverything Award, please do consider giving your vote to the EyeWriter project. All past participants in the Futuresonic festival are eligible. Please check out the following links to learn more about our efforts, send us your comments and consider casting your vote for the EyeWriter.
http://www.futureeverything.org/awards
to vote, look for an email that was sent around febuary 16th, with the subject:
Invitation to vote on FutureEverything Award and join Community
If you don’t have that email (which contains login info), you can email Karen: karen@futureeverything.org, who can set you up with login info.
Thank you for your time and we appreciate your support,
The EyeWriter Team
http://eyewriter.org — (the project site)
http://fffff.at/tempt1/photos/eyetags/ — (Tony’s artwork using the eyewriter)
http://fffff.at/how-to-build-an-eyewriter-in-mumbai-part-i/ — (the
first phase of our development in India)
http://collab.eyewriter.org/ — (the EyeWriter class taught at Parsons in NYC)
http://fffff.at/gml-robotagger/ — (experiments using robotic systems
to recreate artwork made by ALS patients)