Watch Where You Are Watching

Working at FSU in an experiment. The headgear had two cameras - one camera watched where I was looking - the second one tracked my eye to see the exact spot where my pupil was focusing.

One of the neat things about living next to a large research university is getting a chance to work with people on the cutting edge of technology.

Yesterday I was called by the Psychology Department at FSU to come over to perform as a Guinea pig. They are studying how people react to signs especially those in a traffic situation. To do that I wore a headpiece that had a camera attached. It also had a device - very similar to a teleprompter - that tracked where my eye was looking. They wanted to see where a pedestrian was looking while they were walking. Of course on a campus with so many pretty girls - I had to make a conscious effort to not be checking out the people - their clothing - or anything like that :-)

I also wore a backpack that had a laptop computer in it - the video of what I was looking at was recorded in the computer. A red dot showed exactly where my eye was focused.

Three students wired me up - turned me loose - and told me to walk through a specific area of the parking garage. Little did I know that there were drivers planned to back out of parking spaces. The entire live recorded experiment took about 1 minute. After it was over - they started removing my equipment. I was surprised to find out that they were done with me.

When they called me - they offered me $25 up front. When I got there - I signed a paper saying my pay was $10 an hour. I figured we would be going at this for 3 hours - which was not bad because 3 nice young ladies were fussing over me. They took me back to the office and gave me $25 cash. They thanked me for my time and said they would be calling me again soon. $25 for 15 minutes - that is like $100 an hour cash. From the time I pulled into my specially marked parking spot until the time they escorted me back to my car was 15 minutes! Heck - a parking spot on campus costs more than that :-)

Of course I will have to claim the money on my income tax - but what's to worry about - I will ask for the Mitt Romney deal which is only 14% income tax. I wonder what the video would have looked like if they didn't tell me the red dot follows exactly where you are looking.