Make: Philly Recap

The folks who are into making stuff in Philadelphia get together every month to show a presentation and have a maker challenge. This was their 9th meeting (on 9/9)!

Slavko Milekic spoke about eye-tracking. If you know the context that the person is in and you know about eye movements, you can infer some interesting things about what someone is thinking. The gaze is a way of pointing, expressing emotion, regulating conversation flow, indicating intimacy and attraction, showing interest, provides feedback and can indicate social hierarchal positions. According to Milekic, Eyes only acquire information when they are stable. Which is only for 200-300 milliseconds at a time called fixations. (The jumping around is called “saccades) Milekic also mentioned that in 1967 a Russian mounted suction cups with mirrors attached to folks eyes and then light was reflected off of it which made it possible to document someone’s eye movement by having the reflected light expose s piece of film on the wall. If you know more about this, leave a note in the comments!

At every meetup, they have a Make: challenge where you have about an hour to make something. This time, each group had to build a section of a Rube Goldberg machine and use a bunch of junk lying around to make it all work! This project was so fun. It’s great to see such a vibrant, vital Make: community doing such cool stuff! – Make: Philly Link

Jake recorded another angle that shows the action clearer – Link