A New User Interface

Implementing Eye-Tracking technologies and Game Logic, this project directly addresses emerging issues in HCI (Human Computer Interaction) by challenging participants to develop new techniques -- both competitively and collaboratively -- in order to successfully navigate a visual field of information.

Unravelling Concepts

As simple eye-coordination exercises develop into a final confrontation with the screen, OVERSIGHT delicately touches upon difficult controversies in Information Awareness, Superiority, Regulation, and Submission.

Dual Navigation of a Scene

Current implementations of eye-tracking focus on single-users. This project is designed to explore the psychological complexity of multiple-users by harnessing two, and serves as a conceptual stepping-stone to proceed to three or more. Eventually there will be a social network of viewers, each with their own agendas and desires, and each battling for control of the image.

Data Collection for Future Development

Any technology that grants users greater control over what they see, also grants the authors of that technology the ability to 'listen' to the viewers. As such, statistical data such as the frequency of eye-movement, or the tendency to focus on one aspect of an image, can be collected and employed in later phases of the project.

The Dangerous Photograph

This work builds from a set of narratives that explore the "hidden meanings" captured by the photographic image. In the short story "Las Babas del Diablo", Julio Cortázar's horror-struck photographer thinks he has taken an innocent picture, only to realize that he has uncovered much more. Adapted by Michaelangelo Antonioni into a well-known film version, "Blow-Up", the narrative is a seminal work, and lays the conceptual groundwork for OVERSIGHT. Other experimental films, like "La Jetée" by Chris Marker and "Wavelength" by Michael Snow, similarly project nearly-impossible realities into photographs.

An Art-and-Engineering Collaboration

The Project Artists, Javier Villegas and Pablo Colapinto, are PhD students in the department of Media Arts and Technology at University of Santa Barbara California.