OK, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but this application is cool! I found it by chance on Sourceforge, while voting on the Community Choice Awards winners, and that’s the application I always wanted. But wait, what are we even talking about?
Ever thought about how it would be to control your mouse cursor without using a mouse? Now it’s possible, with eViacam. It moves your mouse cursor according to your eye movement. OK, by now you have to move your head, but it’s surely working. And all you need is a webcam. It works with any webcam. After a short while you get used to the way it moves the cursor. To be honest, of course you can move the cursor faster using your mouse, but hey, that wouldn’t be as much fun. And of course it’s a great accessibility technology. It supports enabling on-screen keyboards like gok or iok, so that users that can’t use their hands can fully use their computers more easily. I think a video will show more (by the way, he doesn’t do the mouseclicks with his mouse, eViacam does it automatically when you stop moving the cursor):
(everytime I see KDE in a video I ask myself: Hell, why am I not using KDE? 
)
So, what do you need to get it running?
1.)A webcam. If your webcam works with Cheese you shouldn’t encounter any problems.
2.)eViacam. I’m already working on Fedora packages, but the app doesn’t stand the fortify flags, and so they’re useless. You have to compile it yourself for now. That’s fortunatly not very hard. I just compiled it in my home directory and created a panel launcher afterwards. First, create a directory for the sources, and then
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/eviacam/files/eviacam/eviacam_1.1.orig.tar.gz
Untar the source code with tar -xzf eviacam_1.1.orig.tar.gz and cd eviacam-1.1 into the eviacam directory.
Get the build dependencies with yum install opencv-devel wxGTK-devel libXtst-devel libXext-devel
Then you can just do a ./configure and a make and voila, you’re done. You can execute the app now with ./src/eviacam (when you’re in the eviacam-1.1 directory). I suggest creating a launcher for it, so you don’t always have to open the terminal and run it by hand. You could also do a make install if you want, but I prefer to keep self-built software in my home directory.
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