I was having trouble thinking of a metaphor and decided came up with something I call a “visual itch”. Kind of like an itch you can’t reach, there’s something that catches your eye, but when you look at it, it’s either gone, or you can’t see what it was that made you look in the first place. It’s irritating, and I was thinking I could try and create that effect.

My idea is to have some kind of video playing, probably with a kaleidoscopic effect, and have a camera track eye movement. A large white spot will show on the screen to block whatever it is that the person is looking at. I’m not sure eye tracking is entirely possible in Max with the equipment I’ve got, so if I have to, I can just use face tracking. It’ll require physically moving the head, but it would achieve about the same result if the person keeps their eyes straight forward.

Small images, something eye-catching, will flicker briefly in different places on the screen to draw attention and then disappear before the viewer can fully register them. It can be text or a familiar image. For that to fully work, though, I’ll have to figure out a way to track eye movement, because when something catches the eyes, they move before the head, so face tracking might not necessarily help. Or maybe it would be fine anyway if they just flicker fast enough.

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I’ll clean up the patch later.

I’m thinking my idea is a little too simple. I’m not exactly poetic, so I’m not very good at coming up with metaphors. I imagine a “visual itch” would be pretty cool to do, but what I have in mind is too ambitious for my technical skills, so I’ll have to simplify it.

An alternative name for this project could be “blind spot”.