Throw the mouse and keyboard! Almost a startup from Ukraine: CrossView

Today there was a desire to share the success of my fellow countrymen from Donetsk. The guys did the impossible, or almost the impossible. They took what lay on the surface, spiced up with the spirit of a startup and the sauce of rivalry, which ultimately allowed the CORE INVADER team to take the first place in the All-Ukrainian competition Imagine Cup 2010.

As it is known, in April, the Imagine Cup competition was held among student teams. It is necessary to pay tribute to the computer academy “STEP” - among 11 Ukrainian teams (Lviv National Polytechnic University, Kharkiv National Aerospace University (KHAI), Kiev Polytechnic Institute (KPI), Sumy University and six teams of the STEP Computer Academy from Odessa, Donetsk (three teams), Lviv and Dnepropetrovsk) the first three places were taken by the teams of the above-mentioned academy.
Unfortunately today at Habré I read that other teams got to the final of the contest in Warsaw, but this still does not detract from the achievements of the CORE INVADER team, which did, perhaps only the prototype, but working and showing us how to it seems to be absolutely certain that the technologies of the future will develop. Namely - computer control with the help of eyes.
I was lucky to see the program in operation, and this sight is indescribable, I must tell you. When you see how a person controls the cursor, clicks and types text on the monitor with just an eye - it delights.


I am sure that the program has its own bugs and flaws, for example, it will not work, it will affect the cursor movement, however, when calibrating, I saw that the program automatically fixed the location of the eyes and nose, tobish by modifying the algorithm it will be possible to catch the moment of movement by the same nose heads and do not let the cursor move. But all this stuff if you think about what four students are capable of, and how could this project be able to refine, say, a full-fledged team with appropriate funding.

It is a pity that such a concept as “business angels” is almost completely absent in Ukraine - after all, I am sure that such a startup somewhere in the Americas would be picked up quickly. The idea of ​​the program itself is very valuable for humanity - after all, how many people in the world are immobilized, for whom communication is important. And the cost of equipment for such a program is just scanty - this is just a webcam, not counting the computer itself. Minimum requirements for 1.3 MP camera. When I was shown the work of CrossView - it was the usual 2 megapixel webcam bought for 130 UAH ($ 16) on the radio market.
')
I hope the project will continue to develop beyond the Imagine Cup.

upd: as it turned out, the idea is not new and has long been implemented:
Zeldan wrote:

I will say even more, in the USA for a long time there are people who earn money with this. For normal programmers, such software is not a problem to write at all. Oh, yes, the link to the site www.eyetechds.com , by the way, there are several companies that do the same thing. The innovativeness of this technology is doubtful ...

Therefore, I take off my claims for innovation :)

upd 2: it turned out that the captain of this team, Agent_Smith , is registered on Habré , at his request I take a post from the drafts, maybe someone will have questions about the program.