Try to imagine a mechanic with grease-stained hands trying to flip through the pages of a car maintenance guide. Every time you put the wrench down, clean yourself carefully so as not to get dirty, turn the page and start again. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Center for Organics, Materials and Electronic Devices in Dresden (better known as COMEDD) must have experienced this sensation many times, who have developed special glasses capable of allowing the wearer to comfortably leaf through a digital document using only his eye movements.
An eye reader, in fact. The possibilities of use are many (are you still stuck at the mechanic?): Technicians, surgeons and in general all those who want to read something without using their hands.
[highlight]How they are made – [/highlight]Inside them, these special glasses incorporate a combination of OLED pixels and photodiodes: the former constitute the 'display' that shows the images, the latter act as a sort of video camera that captures the user's eye movements, to convert them into commands.
[highlight]How they work – [/highlight]Whoever wears the lenses can normally look at everything that happens: when he is interested in reading an electronic document he just needs to point his gaze 'towards the horizon' (far away and slightly upwards) to see the image projected at a distance of about one meter in front of him. To turn the page, all he has to do is move his eye to the small arrows on the sides of the document (the infamous Google glasses also require a slight movement of the head, an annoying feature that I hope will be removed before we all turn into tic-men).
COMEDD glasses are able to transmit and receive information even wirelessly, interacting with both LINUX and Windows computers.
