www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRnBg9gflZM

This idea, like most good ones, came to me while I was in my bathroom.  I recently took delivery of a Microvision SHOWWX laser pico projector, and I was trying to come up with a quick project to show the cool stuff it could do.  I noticed that the light above my mirror was diffused by a large frosted glass dome, which led to this strange project.  It’ll probably make more sense around Halloween.

The software is pretty similar to what I wrote the last time I did face tracking:  OpenCV’s very convenient Haar feature detection along with Pygame to do the image display.  I tried taking a picture of my own eye, but Flickr user Sarah Cartwright’s is much more photogenic and available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike.

A regular pico projector would probably work as well, but the contrast ratio on this thing means it looks like the iris is being projected by itself.  I have some much cooler projects planned that will really take advantage of the focus free nature of the laser projector.  In the mean time, the code for this project is available below.  The image is CC A-SA, the code is public domain, and the Haar file is Intel License Agreement like the rest of OpenCV.  I also attached the Python script itself for perusal by search engines or folks who just want to see the code.

Download:
EvilEye.zip
EvilEye.py

As a crash course in learning the basics of Pygame, I wrote a quick little Activity for the OLPC XO.  It is a clone of xeyes, except instead of following the mouse cursor, it uses the webcam to be creepy and follow your face.  It’s a bit slow, and kind of messy, but I did only make it for learning purposes.

It uses OpenCV, so you’re going to need a version of it that works on the XO.  The latest source from CVS works, or you can install a patched rpm of it that I hacked together:

sudo rpm -i http://eclecti.cc/files/opencv-1.0.0-3olpchack.fc7.i386.rpm

You’ll also need the opencv-python package, which is available in the repository.

sudo yum install opencv-python

You can get the .xo itself here: PyEyes-1.xo