Avra Labs Eye Control
Avra Labs Eye Control is a mouse replacement designed to help people with arm difficulties use Windows with their eyes. It currently works with Tobii eye-trackers and uses the OptiKey on-screen keyboard for typing. This project is provided for free with the intention of helping people to use computers, as well as to support technological advancement in the eye-tracking and AAC fields.
User Experience Enhancements
Noteworthy enhancements tested to be more intuitive and productive compared to other software alternatives include:
- Calibration animation that's easier for users to complete, takes 10 seconds, and improves accuracy by about 3x compared to other calibration animation methods
- Click-to-zoom: first click is always a zoombox, 2nd click will apply the click operation (left or right click)
- Dwell-drop-scroll: when multiple scrollbars are present on the screen, this allows dropping a "scroll icon" at a dwell point and scrolling is performed automatically for the user
- Automatic on-screen keyboard: Similar to Android/iOS, when an input box is clicked, the on-screen keyboard automatically appears
- Hidden cursor and thus the screen doesn't hover/light-up everywhere you look
Getting Started
The software can be downloaded from Releases here on Github: https://github.com/rishikapadia7/AvraLabsEyeControl/releases
Getting started wiki page: https://github.com/rishikapadia7/AvraLabsEyeControl/wiki/Getting-Started-Usage-Guide
License
Project is licensed under the Apache License version 2.0.
Credits
The Avra Labs Eye Control project is a combination of 2 major items: 1) Mouse Replacement 2) Keyboard replacement
The project was conceptualized in June 2017 by Michael Lai who was completing Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada. After trying existing eye-tracking technologies and dissatisfied with the user experience, Michael saw the potential of improving the lives of individuals with arm difficulties. To help complete and execute his vision, Michael brought on Rishi Kapadia.
We would like to thank the following in making this project successful:
- Tobii - for creating the affordable Tobii 4C
- Julius Sweetland and the Optikey team - for creating a comprehensive keyboard replacement
- Nash8350 and PrecisionGazeMouse - provided foundational code for working with the Tobii SDK. This project continues to use the PrecisionGazeMouse namespace/filenames, as well as Apache License.
- perevoznyk on github - for creating karna-magnification which powers the zooming mechanism
- All other open source projects that this project references and uses
Contact
If you have questions on integrations, modifications, my learnings through the project or anything else - feel free to send me an email at rishi@avralabs.com