Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–28 of 28 posts

Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming

#21

Post by tdaltonc »

harperlee wrote: post #17
tdaltonc wrote: post #2

So they talk about 4 ways to use eye tracking, 1) Use gaze to control the camera pivot -- That sounds incredibly annoying. Like I wouldn't be able to just look around a screen without it constantly moving. Though if a system is built with this use case in mind it could be cool. Imagine having a whole 360* view on screen but with it kind of squished around the edges, when you look out to an area on the edge it could i…

> Monsters that can only move when you look away (or blink) This could be so cool, reminds me (probably you might have been inspired by it!) to this enemies from Dr. Who, the weeping angels. I'd recommend anyone curious to look at the episode "Blink" (it seems that it is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vahAzc2l9w )

Ya, I was thinking of Boo's and weeping angles.

Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming

#22

Post by CM30 »

So, this article. Read it a few days ago, and while I do like some concepts (like the below mentioned monsters that move when you're looking away thing), a lot just seems like it'd be more annoying than anything else.

Camera controlled by where you look? Oh, that's good, except quite a lot of the time in games you don't want to have the camera follow your gaze your screen. For example, in a lot of platformers, you want to be able to see as much of the area as possible in order to judge where you're jumping too. If the camera tracks your eye movements... well, someone's probably falling into the abyss pretty soon.

I don't think anyone would want to be trying Grandmaster Galaxy or Champion Road with this sort of tech any time soon.

There's also the way a lot of games have 'lock on' mechanics for targeting enemies. Your attacks go one way (towards the enemy), but the camera focuses somewhere else to give you a better view of your surroundings. I can see that falling apart pretty quickly if eye tracking got brought into it.

But even assuming it'll mostly be used for games with a first person viewpoint (which in itself might be a limiting factor for things like virtual reality, since it's a smaller percentage of games than people like to think), it just seems like it'd be a bit too... precise for a lot of titles. People playing games look all over the screen for things that might be important in the future, and they probably don't want the camera bouncing around like a pinball as a result.

The focus and depth of field aspects seem the only plausible ones for most games.

Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming

#25

Post by tracker1 »

Is it sad that all I see this turning into is REALLY annoying ads in streaming apps? I'm a little cynical, but I think that VR interaction might benefit from this a little bit, but most of the interactions in gaming are better served be a more immersive display option, with full head tracking.

Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming

#26

Post by ggreer »

lifeformed wrote: post #10

Wasn't there a Microsoft demo using eye tracking, where only the focused area of the screen was rendered at full resolution, and the rest at lower blurred resolution? It saved a lot of GPU power by just needing to draw a tiny fraction of the game, and it looked indistinguishable to the player. What happened to that?

You're thinking of Foveated 3D Graphics[1]. Despite being a research project, they still got a 5-6x performance improvement.

VR will get foveated rendering eventually. The performance improvements are too good to ignore.

1. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/foveated_final15.p...

Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming

#27

Post by andersto »

Hey, I am working with Tobii and I saw this thread so let me try to give some background info about the Tobii EyeX to answer some of the questions in this thread.

We really value the community and comments at Hacker News and we know there are equal amounts of excitement and doubts about eye tracking and I am gonna have a quick giveaway of 10 EyeX sets here in the next 48 hours as well so that some of you can experience it first hand! More on that below but here is some information:

First off, we are not in a position to comment on products from other eye tracking companies globally, nor would we want to speak for them. So I am picking a few key issues here to discuss.

1)"Battery Drain issue" – The battery drain issue is probably more skewed towards mobile gaming and not for desktop/laptops and we are seeing little to no difference in battery drain when playing games with/without our eye tracker.

2)"Supplanting the hand controlled devices for aiming or changing POV” - We don’t intend to replace mice, keyboards or even to compete with them, but enhance the gaming experience with as natural interactions as possible. We already play games looking at the screen, and we can make your eyes a useful component of gameplay.

3)“Cannot do a high-res head pose estimation at high frame rate” - We are focused on eye tracking and have elements of head tracking but it is mainly on the point of gaze instead.

4)“Is the precision in the current tech good enough to replace the mouse for non-gaming activities?, web browsing or using a classical GUI with buttons and text fields and stuff” - Technically it is possible for similar levels of accuracy, but our intention was always to use it in combination with other modalities. We have plenty of people in the office who have become much less reliant on a mouse with the eye tracker but natural, learned interaction is not at a hands-free stage at the moment.

Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming

#28

Post by andersto »

andersto wrote: post #27

Hey, I am working with Tobii and I saw this thread so let me try to give some background info about the Tobii EyeX to answer some of the questions in this thread. We really value the community and comments at Hacker News and we know there are equal amounts of excitement and doubts about eye tracking and I am gonna have a quick giveaway of 10 EyeX sets here in the next 48 hours as well so that some of you can experien…

5)“Eye fatigue comes in pretty quickly” - we don’t want you to do anything differently, but play as naturally as possible since the eye tracker is monitoring your eye movements. So there is really NO NEED to stay perfectly still, blink or be unnaturally close to the screen.

6)"Use gaze to control the camera pivot -- That sounds incredibly annoying.” - We understand the doubts but we are pretty confident that you might have a different opinion after trying it out! A gamespot reporter did the same:http://l.gamespot.com/1Mm7rar

7)“Making the foreground in sharper focus than background and peripheral objects. Why is this necessary?” - We want allow your normal human vision to exist within the game based on your natural focus to allow for real depth instead of a flat screen. @teckromancr @blakecaldwell and @tdaltonc got it right!

8)"Is it sad that all I see this turning into is REALLY annoying ads in streaming apps?"/"I do not look forward to advertisements using this technology.” - We have no intentions of making ads from eye tracking! We also have SDK agreements based on not allowing infringement of privacy. Its been 15 years in eye tracking for Tobii so personal integrity is something we take extremely seriously.

So if any of you want to try out the tracker, all you have to do is tweet "let me try @tobiieyex via #hackernews!” and we will DM you for your details. The first 10 individuals to tweet it within 48 hours will get our latest Tobii EyeX shipped right to you, free of charge. All we want is for you to really play/test it out for yourself. We have not done this with any other community before but hacker news is pretty special to us!

Post reply on HN