“YOU are the controller” is the tagline for Microsoft Kinect. Tobii, a developer of eye-tracking technology, has a similar idea, though it’s zeroed in on one specific part of “you”–your eyes. A pair of peepers is all you need to play Eye Asteroids, which debuted at New York’s Dave & Buster’s arcade earlier this week.

The game is simple enough: Essentially a flashy update of the classic Atari title, Eye Asteroids sees the player pilot through seemingly endless fields of flying outer-space rocks. This time, however, you’re piloting an entire planet, the graphics are full color, and some dodging of radiation belts is thrown in, too. You use your eyes to control all of it–just glance at an asteroid to fire the planet-based laser that will cut it to pieces–though there’s a bit of head movement incorporated to avoid those fiery radiation fields.

The game calibrates to your eyes before you begin, though if you wear powerful glasses it can affect the quality of the calibration. Actual gameplay takes getting used to, mainly because we’re not used to simply looking at a target to shoot at it. It’s a bit unsettling at first–you get the sense this is how the X-Men’s Cyclops felt when he first discovered his powers.

Tobii has only made 50 Eye Asteroids game units, and they cost $15,000 each, so they’re probably only destined for big-name arcades and a few corporate showrooms. But the company says it has other products in the pipeline that we’ll see in the next couple of years–its already demo’d a prototype laptop that it partnered with Lenovo to make. Eye-controlled TVs? “Don’t blink” just took on new meaning.

Get this. NTT Docomo has designed a pair of headphones that can detect your eye movement, which if performed correctly, can change tracks, pause/play and stop your mp3 player.

Using something called electroculograms, the headphone some how sense which direction a person is looking when wearing the ear buds.  Add in some programming and you can control your MP3 player or phone’s media player by performing a set of queues, such as rotating your eyes clockwise to increase volume or looking left to right to skip a track.  Whacked, straight whacked!

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Cold eyes got you down?  Supporting USB 1.1 and 2.0, this new Eye Warmer set-up from Thanko assures you that warm towel feeling you been missing all these years.  On sale now for just $22 you really owe it to yourself to not buy this for yourself or your friends and enemies.

Thanko really has some creative minds at work as the never cease to amaze with their vast array odd products.

File under crap gadgets?

[via CrunchGear]

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Consider this a cautionary tale against trying to fix your iPod or your iPhone yourself.  Recently, a guy over in Sussex (like the European Sussex) tried fixing it.  And he’d checked online, and discovered that the repair process was not what you’d call difficult.  So he started in, and got the first couple of screws out, but discovered that that glass face plate wasn’t exactly the easiest removal in the instruction set.  So he goes at it with a knife.

You can about imagine what happens here, but let’s just say: explosion, glass shards, eye.

You can connect the dots from there.

So he got himself to the hospital and discovered he’d damaged the protective layer covering his eye.  Now he’ll be wearing an eye patch for the next several weeks, and imagine the shock and horror he felt upon coming home and seeing the shattered iPhone, right where he left it.

Consider yourselves warned.

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A couple of high school students in Argentina have created an ‘eye mouse’.  Yes, yes, the concept isn’t new, but it’s pretty damn cool that high school student we’re able to build one.  So what did they use?  A webcam, infrared light and metal flexible tube for the headband.

[Uglydoggy via Neatorama]