What this is

Don't Blink is the staring contest everyone played as a kid, with one difference: the referee is a face-tracking model running in your browser instead of a friend who cheats. You open the page, let it see your eyes, and try to keep them open. The moment your eyelids drop, the clock stops and the site shows you the exact frame that got you.

It is free, there is no account, and there is nothing to install. It works on a laptop or a phone, as long as the device has a front camera and a modern browser.

How the blink detection works

The game uses MediaPipe Face Landmarker, an open-source model from Google that places hundreds of landmark points on a face in real time. Six of those points sit around each eye. From them the game computes the eye aspect ratio (EAR) — the height of the eye opening divided by its width.

An open eye has a high EAR. As the eyelid comes down, the ratio collapses. That is the whole trick, and it is the same measure used in academic drowsiness-detection work.

The threshold is not a fixed number, because eyes are not a fixed shape. Before each run there is a short calibration: the game watches your eyes open, learns your baseline ratio, and sets the blink threshold relative to it. Somebody with narrow eyes and somebody with wide ones are then judged against themselves, not against an average.

A run ends when two consecutive frames come back below your threshold. One frame would be too twitchy — a single bad detection would end the round unfairly. Two in a row is a real eyelid.

If the model loses your face entirely — you turn away, you cover the camera, you walk off — that also ends the run, after a slightly longer tolerance. Otherwise the fastest way to a world record would be to put a hand over the lens.

Nothing leaves your device. The model runs inside your browser. Your video is never uploaded, recorded, or seen by us. The only thing sent to the server is your chosen name and a number of milliseconds. Full detail on the privacy page.

How runs are timed, and why some carry a check mark

Here is a problem every leaderboard on the open web has, and this one had it badly: the score is just a number sent to a server. Anyone who opens the developer console can send any number they like.

In June 2026 somebody did exactly that. The top three rows on this board read 2069, 2068 and 2067 seconds — thirty-four minutes without blinking — filed within half a minute of each other under the names of two Breaking Bad characters. They were never played. And because the home page shows the top score as its headline, every new visitor was greeted with an unbeatable target invented by one bored person.

So the server now issues the clock. When a run starts, the browser asks for a signed token that records the moment it was handed out. When the score is submitted, the token comes back with it, and the run cannot claim more seconds than have actually passed since the server issued it. Each token spends once.

This does not make lying impossible — someone patient can still hold a token open and lie inside the window. It makes lying cost exactly the time being claimed, which is the difference between a thirty-four-minute record appearing in one command and one costing somebody thirty-four minutes of their afternoon.

Runs the server timed itself are marked verified. Runs without a valid token still save, because a flaky connection at the start of a round should not cost you your score — but they are capped at five minutes, and a five-minute claim is inside the range a determined human can genuinely reach.

Why the default board is weekly

An all-time board eventually becomes a museum. The best row on it was posted months ago by somebody who is not coming back, and the number reads as unreachable rather than as a challenge. So the board you see by default covers the last seven days. Its target is a number a real person posted this week, and it is beatable. The all-time board is still there, one tap away, for the record.

The statistics

Because every run is recorded, this site can answer a question the rest of the internet only guesses at: how long can ordinary people actually keep their eyes open? The statistics page is computed live from the real runs on this board — median, spread, and how the whole field distributes. It is the only original data here, and it is genuinely ours.

Further reading

Contact

Questions, a bug, a leaderboard row you want removed, or a partnership: yohann@kipdev.io. Mail is read by a person and answered.

Publisher

KIPDEV
SIREN: 884 120 890
Company record on Pappers
Email: yohann@kipdev.io

Hosting

Hostinger International Ltd.
hostinger.com

Enough reading. Your eyes are already getting dry.

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