“This is one of the first devices that will allow us to monitor human facial activity in detail and it has a variety of potential applications ranging from [VR] gaming to healthcare,” said Professor VP Nguyen, a computer scientist at Texas.
“The project bridges the gap between anatomical and muscular knowledge of the human face, and electrical and computational modelling techniques to develop analytical models, hardware and software libraries for sensing face-based physiological signals.”
Nguyen is director of the university’s wireless and sensor systems laboratory, which is focused on building connected systems to monitor and improve human health and environment. He has received a grant of almost $250,000 from the National Science Foundation for the VR project, which is one part of a larger grant with collaborators from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
Current VR headsets remain bulky - despite considerable R&D effort from companies including...