If you have no problem having one eye looking at you all the time from your monitor, prepare your creative gene and download the shots of this new anthropomorphic webcam.
Its name is Eyecam, and it has been designed by a team from the University of Saarland in Germany, led by postdoctoral researcher Marc Teyssier. It is part of the InteractiveSkin project, funded with European funds, which aims to develop new electronic interfaces.
His body is a 3D printed polymer, he has a silicone skin and an eyebrow made from human hair implants. The eyeball is artificial, of course.
Here you have it on video:
As far as electronics are concerned, its base is a Raspberry Pi Zero with a 720p / 60fps video camera contained within the eyeball. It has six servo motors that move the eye to follow the user, and it also allows blinking and moving the eyebrows to give it even more realism.
To use it, you just have to connect it to the USB port, so that the device is automatically recognized.
It is possible that interfaces of this type can express emotions in the future, showing what the user himself feels or what the person with whom we are talking feels, but for now it is just an experiment that we will not see in stores.
The creators say that at the moment they just want to draw attention to the fact that we are surrounded by detection devices every day.
There is a document about the project already available at this link, and they have the plans in open source, for the most handyman.
