eyeTV

A vortex of realtime webcam images of faces on a computer screen sorted so that you are looking at everyone and everyone is looking at you, so that it estimates a social setting where everyone is looking at everyone else - so that the intricacies of eye contact and response can be documented and measured, and/or augmented.

The webcam images could be sortable according to keyword search criteria, social networking information or criteria like who has their eyes closed to the cam, or who scores highest on a distributed rating system.

This idea comes out of a lot of time spent standing in the far end of a subway car, at the end of the aisle looking down the car so that my visual field is pretty evenly filled up with peripheral eye contact, and noticing that this creates a visual network that is pretty responive -- so when you blink, it creates a liquid swirl of activity in the form of other blinks, head turns, scratches etc.

So if you could have a computer screen, or even better a virtual reality made up of only realtime videos of eyes, or faces, or realtime images that are selected based on an algorithm that changes in real time according to your input, either automatically or according to search criteria, well who knows what would come out of it. And then you could record it and use the data to create data visualizations, and to augment the reality, to either teach people to notice what they otherwise weren't or to just play.