I found a website project: Clickclickclick.click (Moniker & VPRO Medialab, 2016), an interactive website with almost no visible content. When you arrive, a plain page shows a single green button. As you move your mouse, scroll, resize the window, or leave the tab, a disembodied voice narrates each action aloud (“The user has moved their cursor to the left,” “The user is hesitating”), and a growing log of “achievements” records what it has observed. The site never asks permission and never explains itself, yet it feels like it looking at you and maybe teasing you (and you are called subject somehow made you feel like you are the laboratory mouse).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What makes the piece work is not technical sophistication but framing. Nothing it detects is secret; it uses ordinary browser events. The magic comes from the voice, the timing, and the escalating sense of a presence on the other side of the screen. This is precisely the effect I want in my project, where a meditative “connect with me” intro leads into a mind-reading act powered by webcam eye tracking. Where Clickclickclick.click is cold and surveillant, I want a warmer, theatrical register closer to a mentalist’s stage act. Accoriding to Derren Brown describes “”in Tricks of the Mind (Brown, 2006).,audiences will attribute intention and insight to a system that simply reflects their own behaviour back at them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Studying it, the skills I need become clear. Technically, I need front-end development (JavaScript, React, animation libraries such as Rive or GSAP), plus experience integrating browser-based gaze estimation. WebGazer.js (Papoutsaki et al., 2016) is the most accessible option, but its accuracy is limited, so I will need to design “tricks” around dwell time and coarse regions rather than precise coordinates, and build silent (alternative)fallbacks (mouse hesitation, timing) for when tracking fails. Visually, I need illustration and frame-by-frame animation skills for a hand-drawn UI, and sound design for the trance-like intro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For research, the psychology of cold reading and the Barnum effect, so the “readings” land regardless of tracking accuracy; the ethics and UX of webcam access, including how to secure consent without breaking the illusion; and interactive narrative design, so the experience has a satisfying arc from invitation to reveal. Clickclickclick.click deliberately withholds its reveal; I want to decide whether mine should end with a moment of explanation, turning surveillance-anxiety into wonder rather than unease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This week’s progress. This week I focused on scoping rather than building. I wrote out the user journey (question prompt, breathing sequence, gaze calibration disguised as ritual, the reading, and a reveal) and researched the tool stack, settling provisionally on React with WebGazer.js for gaze tracking, Rive for hand-drawn interactive animation, and browser-exposed device data (time, battery, timezone, referrer) for the “did my data leak?” moment. I have not written code yet. For next 2 weeks, I plan to build a bare prototype of the calibration-to-card-choice sequence to test how reliably WebGazer can distinguish which of four cards a user is looking at, and to start sketching the visual language for the intro screens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
References<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brown, D. (2006). Tricks of the mind. Channel 4 Books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n