In 2003, Los Angeles based graffiti artist Tony Quan was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, which left every muscle in his body paralyzed apart from his eyes. Eye-tracking equipment is commercially available, but usually carries a hefty price tag and a group of artists and engineers were determined to let Tony draw again without breaking the bank.
Zach Lieberman of the Graffiti Research Lab along with developers from Free Art and Technology, OpenFrameworks and the Ebeling Group created an affordable, open source system called the EyeWriter, which is a DIY kit built estimated to cost about $50, that can be built on to a pair of regular eyeglasses.
“… we assembled a kind of wire frame that holds a Web cam, a small camera that we’ve mounted close to the eye,” Lieberman explains. “We’ve written software that tracks the eye, and then we calibrate with [Quan's] eye movements and the computer screen … he can plot points. And from plotting points, create letters. And from creating letters, create words. And then color the words, shade the words, extrude them in 3-D, add different features,” he added.
Lieberman and his team have won a Future Everything Award for innovation, which includes a cash prize, but say that wealth is not their goal, rather they want to help people communicate: “There are people who have loved ones who have ALS or locked-in syndrome … or other diseases, where having that option, at least, of a kind of device that you can build for somebody in need is really important and really necessary,” he says. “We’re not in it to make money. This is really coming from the heart.”
Source: NPR
According to the Telegraph, Jeremy Kite, Dartford Council leader calls this experiment a success. “People told us they feel safer and they are enjoying the music.” Subways in Blackburn and Burney have also experienced a reduction of graffitti and youth gatherings.
There’s an ambitious new graffiti writer in town. The first time I saw one of the big, hand-lettered READ signs that have popped up on boarded storefronts around New Orleans over the past few weeks, I thought it was a sort of public service announcement. I imagined that a neighborhood literacy activist was advising the world to hit the books, or something like that. 
To Mr. READ’s credit, most (though not all) of the tags I’ve seen have been applied to the plywood protecting unoccupied storefronts, not to the stores themselves. The big, black-and-white tags are a bit brutal, to be sure. They certainly don’t have the lilting poetry of the Banksy graffiti that wowed the Crescent City almost a year ago. But they have a purposeful punch that places them above the usual aerosol scribbles.I recently met a Brooklyn street artist named Gaia, who knows way more than I do about the national scene. Gaia said that though he doesn’t know Mr. READ (aka Read More Books or The Booker), he believes that the ambitious tagger has hit San Francisco, Cleveland and New York, as well as New Orleans.
As an art critic, I’ve always been ambivalent about reviewing graffiti. On one hand, most graffiti remains more antisocial that artistic. On the other, graffiti is very fashionable these days, and, let’s face it, way more people see it than ever cross the threshold of an art gallery or museum. Even in museums, graffiti is making a splash. I’m told that the original version of street art star Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous Obama election poster titled “Hope” is the most popular attraction at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Fairey, who is known to paste posters in public places without permission, recently was fined $2,000 for vandalism in Boston. I’m sure he can afford the price of street cred; I recently saw hand-painted original posters by Fairey for sale at a Washington gallery for $10,000 to $25,000 each. And the two years’ probation he received might be welcome. At age 39, he doesn’t need to be out running the streets anyway.
The topic of graffiti is very divisive. Some view it as art, while others perceive it as nothing more than vandalism. Here’s a little something that will fuel that debate, a concept addon controller for the 
Tired of cleaning up after taggers, the Midtown Business Association is taking a different tack. It’s actually inviting street artists to splash wild, colorful graffiti on designated walls and buildings.