Masayasu Ogata’s PYGMY robot rings, recently seen at the Interaction 2012 Conference in Tokyo facilitates interaction by expressing emotion through a small mechanical display on each ring. Since scientists like to make things creepy, the display looks like a blinking eye.

The eyes can be controlled remotely or with a smartphone application. Some of the applications shown included games, voice recognition, finger walking and kicking. The idea is that the eyes can help display the “emotion” conveyed by the wearer’s fingers. While I’m not quite sure what the real world use would be for these, it will be interesting to see where they go with this technology.

[robots-dreams via Ubergizmo]

The orb-shaped display has a big iris and retina on it and makes the rough display look like a giant eyeball sitting there on the podium. The Kinect sees when a person walks up and the eye pops up on the sphere and then follows the person as they walk around the room. You can see the setup in action below.

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The guys from The Technology Studio have a quick description of how they made it work here, and you can even grab the code over at Github – assuming you have a Puffersphere to display it on. They also posted an awesome Eye of Sauron version of the demo too:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The Weird Sisters would so love this hack.

[via YouTube]

The guys at Waterloo Labs rigged up an eye-tracking contraption using electrodes placed around each eye, then mapped through a custom circuit and a Single-Board RIO system to convert eye movements into joystick movements on the NES.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Frankly, the whole “look up to jump” thing seems a little ridiculous. There’s nothing quite like looking away from the screen to control a game. Still, it doesn’t look much sillier than trying to play Microsoft’s Kinect.

[via Wired via Gizmodo]

Here’s some sexy specs for audiophiles: the microphone is a condenser with a wide frequency response, from 35 Hz to 20 kHz, and a 16-bit audio sample rate of 44.1 kHz. Yeah. Awesome. I don’t know what we’re talking about.

Non-techie users should also consider the Eyeball because it’s easy to install – it works out of the box with both Mac and Windows systems, no drivers needed. The Eyeball’s stand also doubles as its compartment, so it’s quite portable as well. Here’s Mark from Coolest Gadgets‘ review of the Eyeball, taken using the Eyeball itself.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Convinced yet? You can get the Eyeball for $140 (USD) (or less; I could have bought it for $70 as of this writing, just click “add to cart” to see the discount) at Amazon.

The position of the left eyeball signifies hours, while the right one is minutes. Depending on the time of day, the eyes might be looking up (like at high noon), down (6:30), right (9:45) or left (3:15). The wackiest times of day are probably 3:45 and 6:00, although 3:50 is a pretty goofy time too:

The only thing missing from the clock is a couple of bubble-shaped plastic domes over each of the eyeballs. Speaking of googly eyes, I think this clock would be perfect for this guy…

[via 25togo]

It’s also quite good for sucking all the metal fillings out of their heads. I’m pretty sure that Phil Ken Sebben got his start this way. (Adult Swim reference.)

[via Modern Mechanix via Boing Boing]