Those Who Want to See Must Close Their Eyes

Through-the-eyelid Display

The following experiments investigate the concept of perceiving information through the closed eyelid.

Background

As the eyelid is a thin fold of skin, it does not omit all light from the eye, and also, because of skin colour and blood stream, it changes the light's colour. This principle is, for example, used by so called 'meditation glasses'; here the light shone through the closed eyelids is supposed to have a meditative effect 94.

What I wanted to investigate was how light flashes and also colours, displayed on a laptop screen, would be perceived through the closed eyelid.

Concept

As a part of the Closed-eyes Movies, the applicability of a white blinking screen was to be tested, and subsequently a small test was conducted that displayed one colour after the other on the entire screen, while the users had to estimate the tone with their eyes closed.

Both were rather experiments than applications, yet possibly interesting to be used in future interfaces that involve closed eyes.

Implementation and user test

The users were asked while undergoing the 'Closed eyes Movies' experiment if they were able to perceive the white light flashes the screen showed. This experiment was conducted under different lighting conditions, yet not in bright illumination.

The colours experiment was conducted with 3 users only, who were watching the screen in a barely lit environment.

Summary of findings

While the light flashes were perceived by every subject, the perception of colours through the eyelid was not without its troubles: the perception of colours was often wrong, except for the colour red, which was clearly distinguishable from the other colours. The flashing screen was found to be much more intense than a constantly lit screen.

pro	con
white blinking screen works as a mean of notification through closed eyes applicable also in daylight the colour red was clearly recognized through the eyelid	perception of colours through the eyelid is fuzzy

The flashing through the eyelid did a good job of regaining the user's attention in the movie application. Because of the good perception of a red pane through closed eyes, one could imagine a three-state system (white / red / black) for a future through-the-eyelid display.