Eye-Based Videogame Control

dsmith3689 writes "Researchers at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario have explored the use of an eye tracker as a control device for a handful of commercial video games. To do this, they integrated a Tobii 1750 desktop eye tracker with Quake 2, Neverwinter Nights, and a flash adaptation of Missile Command called Lunar Command. A study was performed that indicates the use of direct feedback from eye movements can drastically increase the feeling of immersion (pdf) in the virtual world."

Forget video games

[Anonymous Coward]

With this technology you could finally have a window manager that implements "focus follows mind".

Re:Cool idea; looks like it still needs work

[minsk]

A lot of that could probably be improved with more powerful algorithms. One of the problems encountered in the Quake demo was that minor twitches threw the gun all over the place. As a result, there is a fairly simple damping (AFAIK just a threshold) in effect to make the game playable.

An algorithm to differentiate unconscious twitches, instantaneous glances, and actual targetted gaze would probably produce a much more impressive control system. My personal feeling is that the best environments will be those where the direction of view is decoupled from the direction of movement, e.g. looking around in first-person, selecting things in a 3rd person, etc.

(Disclaimer: I know the folks behind the paper, but was not involved with the experiment)

Independent view point games?

[SteroidG]

I wish they had done some demos on games with independent view point, such as the upcomming Armed Assault, Lock On and other flight sims. I'm really interested to see if it'll work better than TrackIR [naturalpoint.com].

From the Quake 2 demo, it's really not giving any advantages because your moves with the gun and the body. In Armed Assaunt (or Operation Flashpoint for that matter) where environment awareness is much more important (and *gasps* you head is not attached to the gun!), being able to look around means you have a much greater field of view and able to spot more enemies, check on your team mates to stay in formation, and maybe avoiding the helicopter collisions that we so often have.

Re:Hey! Modded funny?

[Were-Rabbit]

Actually, you bring up a very good point. Does this device take things like lazy eye into account? Does it only track the movements of one eye or both? This would be a great tool for those who don't have appropriate use of hands or have some kind of physical damage that would make handling a mouse or trackball difficult or impossible. But could this thing compensate for lazy eye or those who only have one useful eye?