Oscar Werner, president of Tobii Tech, game me a rundown of the company’s eye-tracking technology for games at CES 2017, and I’m finally getting around to relating that experience. With those demos, I’ve got a better idea about whether this will be the next great user interface for games.
Stockholm-based Tobii’s platform tracks your eye movements and uses them to control a computer.
Image Credit: Tobii
I’m still figuring out just how revolutionary this will be. On the one hand, it’s very cool to use your eyes, and it’s faster too. On the other hand, it is something you have to learn to do. And as I learned in my interview with Synaptics CEO Rick Bergman, it can be very hard to teach humans how to use something new. But there’s no question that Tobii and eye-tracking is gathering momentum.
The sensors have been integrated into a variety of laptops and displays, and around 50 games now take advantage of the eye-tracking controls, Werner said in an interview with GamesBeat.
“Going forward, devices have to understand who you are, what you are doing, and where you are looking,” Werner said.
The uses range from user authentication through iris recognition — in which case the computer needs to know where your iris is and what your eye looks like — to controlling a game in a way that is faster than someone who is competing against you.
Among the laptops that using the technology is the Acer Aspire V 17 Nitro Black Edition, which was introduced at CES, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas earlier this month. The Alienware 17 gaming laptop also has integrated Tobii Aware software, and so does the MSi GT72 6QE Dominator Pro G laptop. Acer will also launch a curve monitor, the Acer Predator Z1, with Tobii built into it.
Eye-tracking with Dying Light
Werner showed me how eye-tracking works with Dying Light, Techland’s hit zombie-killing game that debuted in 2015. I only had a few minutes to learn what to do and form my impressions. But it worked.
With Dying Light, you have to deal with a lot of zombies coming at you at once. But with eye-tracking, using a feature dubbed Aim@Gaze, you have a way to react quickly. If you are facing one direction, and a zombie comes at you from the side, you can press a button and hold it. You then look at the zombie target with your eyes, without changing the way your character is facing. You target the zombie, then release the button. And you throw a knife at that character. This is called Throw@Gaze.
You can also do something called MultiThrow@Gaze. In this case, you can target several zombies with your eye at once by looking at them one by one. When you release your button, you can throw a knife at each target simultaneously, taking out several targets at once. I got the hang of this quickly.
My conclusion is that you can shoot and target faster using Aim@Gaze eye-tracking compared to using a computer mouse, just as using a mouse is faster than using a console game controller. It’s such an unfair advantage that Tobii in many cases doesn’t let you precisely target something. Rather, you get close to the target by using your eyes, and then you have to use the mouse or controller to finish the precise targeting. That’s a little more fair, both to mouse users and to the thing being targeted.
I enjoyed throwing knives. That worked wonderfully well. But throwing knives is a very small part of that game, and I’m not sure how often I would use that trick in gameplay. There are other things you can do that will speed up how quickly you can shift your body while running.
If there’s a chance for Tobii to build an extended tutorial into a game or software program, it will probably become a lot easier to learn.
“I agree, and we are working on a couple of games where we do that,”…