T-800 Terminator Xeyes

2009

Back in the mid 90's when I was an undergraduate student in the Computer Science Department at Adelaide University the computing labs were full of black and white X-terminals running Solaris. Students would spend a lot of time writing cool shell scripts and playing with different X Window managers - sometimes spending so much time that their desktop looked really cool but their grades looked really bad and they would have to repeat a year!

Some of the classic things people would populate their desktops with included: xDaliClock - a digital clock with morphing digits, Xoj - the OJ Simpson chase simulator, and of course Xeyes (you can read the man page for Xeyes here). This is a simple Terminator model T-800 "Xeyes" hack I made using this source image from the movie Terminator 3 and the sample code from this Javascript Eyes that Follow tutorial. If you haven't worked out what's going on yet try moving your mouse around in your browser window and watch the eyes of the T-800 endoskeleton. Coincidentally someone has also implemented a fun Javascript Xeyes demo using a picture of Salvador Dali.

Here's the code used I used to embed the Terminator Xeyes in this page:
<!-- T-800 Terminator Xeyes --> <div style="float:left; background: url(images/T-800-transp.png); background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 400px; height: 400px"> <!-- vertical spacer --> <div style="height: 125px"> </div> <!-- horizontal spacer --> <div style="float: left; height: 90px; width: 118px"> </div> <!-- These are the eyes - width and height = dist between eyes --> <div id="eye1" style="float: left; width: 90px; height: 90px; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial"> <img style="margin: 100px 0pt 0pt 50px;" src="images/eyeball.png" width="21" height="20"> </div> <div id="eye2" style="float: left; width: 90px; height: 90px; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial"> <img style="margin: 32px 0pt 0pt 18px" src="images/eyeball.png" width="21" height="20"> </div> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> EYES.follow ('eye1'); EYES.follow ('eye2'); </script>

You can download the required images and Javascript in this zip file: terminator-xeyes.zip (688KB).

Terminator 2 is one of my all time favourite movies and when it was released back in 1991 I went to the cinema wearing a trenchcoat and a pair of dark sunglasses with red LED "eyes" mounted in them. The eyes were connected to an old broken transistor radio which not only acted as a convenient battery case but I also hacked it so the sunglasses plugged into the headphone jack, and the volume knob could be used to control the brightness of the LEDs.

When we needed a telephone ring extender in our first home I re-used the Terminator LED sunglasses and patched them into the circuit board from an old wall phone. I carefully (and tastefully) mounted the sunglasses on a clay pot that had a face on each side similar to the one shown here in Figure 2 and hid the board inside the pot. When the phone rang the eyes would glow in a way not completely unlike Jeff Tracy receiving a call in Thunderbirds or Batman receiving a call from Commissioner Gordon on the Bat Phone.

Other Projects

You may also be interested in reading about some of my other projects: