Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

Professional-grade commercial eyetracking systems can cost $15,000 (EyeTech) or more (Tobii). Renting is cheaper–about 10% of the retail cost of these systems for a month–but still considerable. And while commercial eyetracking software has advanced significantly in the last few years (e.g. headgear no longer required) and is continuing to advance at an impressive pace (e.g. integration with mobile devices such as laptops and tablets), there is also a growing community focused on open source solutions for eyetracking. The most interesting and consolidated of these communities appears to be around the ITU GazeTracker software, originally developed by the Gaze Group. The community congregates around an discussion forum to discuss the GazeTracker software, specific projects, and DIY hardware builds like Martin Tall’s $600 “Raven”:

The Raven is by no means the cheapest option, but it supposedly offers great precision. Since I’m not able to take any courses this spring, a little DIY building may be in order.

I’ve got to take a minute to plug the software WebCamMax ($50), which lets you alter your (Windows) computer’s webcam input. I used it this week to facilitate quality, DIY streaming and recording of two WCET09 presentations using a laptop (with distinct graphics card), a lavalier mic ($50-$500) and Ustream (free). Here’s how it worked (more…)

In Jennifer Jones‘s latest post My DIY Publishing Roots she relates the very impressive story from her childhood of her mother authoring a piano book for children, adding that her father, too, was very much a DIY-er. My parents were the same way, from home-made clothing to fruit and vegetable gardening, car repairs (my psychologist father even painted our cars in the old barn), house repairs, summer Olympic games for my brother and me, hand-drawn comic books, etc. It just came back to me that my father even made our living room furniture while he was doing his PhD practicum; while he was doing all that wood cutting he fashioned a huge set of Lincoln logs for us kids! And, no, we weren’t hippies living in a commune.

I know this very active practice rubbed off on me, from my willingness to do car repairs, to the palpable responsibility of doing house fixes myself, to doing any sort of grunt tasks on all sorts of projects at work. But I worked on the most memorable DIY projects as an undergrad in college: a self-published collection of poetry by amateur writers from my region in Utah. The project took about a year, but I ended up with an amusing collection of poems with audio recordings featuring the writers themselves that I called “Speak Black Spots”.

As I reflect on this project, my thoughts steer me to consider my motivations for DIY–with things like car repairs and house work I admit it’s largely been a matter of finance; with other things my DIY attitude is often born of a “If you want something done right…” mentality–execution of ideas, to me, is sometimes too precious to hand off to someone else; with “Speak Black Spots” my motivation may have been altogether different: I believed that what I wanted to do had no place in the traditional publishing outlets, and DIY would let me provide freedom of expression, creative control over the product, and immediacy. At the time I thought I was very punk, in fact too punk for punk. The end result was nothing famous or exemplary, but looking back at the last decade I realize this project predicted the attraction and power that self-publishing on the Web would hold for me.

So this all goes far afield of Jennifer’s questions (the most important one, I think, “If we speak and don’t do, who will?”), so let me refocus on the idea that DIY happens for good reasons, one of those being because the institutions or traditional processes don’t always serve the users. I think the sluggishness and bureaucracy of these institutions is born of cautiousness and self-protection–arguably acceptable reasoning when taxpayer/investor dollars and learning outcomes are at stake (this is essentially the conservative point of view which reacts against what may appear to be knee-jerk demands for “change”), but this reality also ensures that there will always be a place for–no, a need for DIY.