Comfort and health
The design of the applications detailed in this section explored how closing the eyes could function as a relieving means in times of visual overload. Partially, the concepts originate from each other, so I will give a brief overview on their lineage:
One of the early ideas in the project was a text processor that started reading out the current sentence as soon as the eyes of the user were closed - similarly, the idea of an audio editor was developed, that started playback upon eye closure. Due to the similarity of the concepts, the latter was not continued, while the former was realized as a functional prototype.
During initial experiments on 'through-the-lid perception', it became obvious that a lit screen is well-perceived through closed eyelids. This led to the principle of blackening the screen, as soon as the user closes both eyes for a certain threshold time. This feature, supporting short breaks in front of the screen, has then been realized in the final implementation.
