Google’s Project Gameface Lets You Control Video Games With Blinks and Smiles

Head-tracking mice are not a new idea, but they mostly rely on big head movements, or tracking eye blinks. That’s what Carr relied on until he lost all of his gaming gear in a house fire: a tragedy that had at least one silver lining, as engineers at Google decided to step in and not only help replace his head-tracking mouse, but work to greatly improve it.

Project Gameface is the result: an open source hands-free gaming mouse that relies on an off-the-shelf webcam pointed at the user’s face. A handful of machine learning models track 468 unique points on the face, allowing GameFace to accurately detect not only movements of the head, but deliberate facial gestures too. These can then be translated to mouse clicks or other shortcuts. To be as accommodating as possible, Project Gameface even allows the size of a gesture to be adjusted, so those only able to make subtle face movements can take advantage of it as well.

Google says Project GameFace is still in development and not quite ready for primetime just yet, but has made it available through GitHub for those wanting to try it out or contribute to the ongoing work on it.

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