Hi all.
I initially posted this project about 2 years ago and got some very useful help from newborn. Unfortunately, I was unable to devote much attention to it at the time and he needed to move on to other things. Recently, I've returned attention to this project and have a demo I'd like to extend.
I'm a research psychologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who studies children with autism (a severe developmental disability associated with difficulties in social relationships and communication). Given many children with autism are severely impaired many of our standardized cognitive and neuropsychological tasks are difficult to administer and therefore yield limited information about how these children process visual information. Individuals with autism show marked impairment in joint attention – that is the ability to follow someone's gaze and identify what it is they are looking at. This shared attention to objects in the environment is one of the basic skills that underlie the development of language and communication. Difficulties with joint attention (i.e., failure to follow someone else's gaze, failing to use pointing gestures) are one of the earliest difficulties seen in young children with autism.
I have started developing a program in which a character's eyes are animated to track a moving object within a scene. Newborn kindly helped me with this project with me nearly two years ago (Thanks again newborn!). My goal is to use this program in our Eye Tracking Lab which records in real-time where an individual is looking while watching a computer monitor. My brief tests so far have been successful and now it's time to extend the program's functionality. I'm not a programmer, but oversee the data management and statistics group at the University of Washington Autism Center (
http://depts.washington.edu/uwautism/about/research_staff.html ) Ultimately, I need the program to accept real-time input of gaze coordinates and be able to react to these. I would see this as a second phase of program development. There are hardware issues that are not yet worked out in feeding the gaze coordinates back into the stimulus presentation computer. But we would need to plan for a continuous input stream of x, y coordinates that correspond to where an individual is looking on the 2D screen.
Below are screenshots of the character looking at the object, then alternatively looking directly at the camera. The code is in C# (VS 2005). I've taken what newborn started and adapted Zaknafein's SkyDemo to create this. I made the head model in Lightwave 7.5. I am clearly not a programmer nor modeler (my training is in child clinical psychology and statistics), but I've found the TV3D community helpful and the TV3D engine accessible enough to take a stab at starting this project. But it is clear to me that I need some additional programming talent to pull this off.
I'm looking for someone (maybe two?) who is interested in working together with me to extend this program for use in our research. If you are interested please email me at the address below.
Thank you.
Jeff Munson, PhD
Autism Center
University of Washington
jeffmun @ u.washington.edu
