How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming
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How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming
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Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming
#2So 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 immediately foveate the display to that area.
2) Eye contact - Could be really cool. Monsters that can only move when you look away (or blink). Or they disappear if you look directly at them. The NPC's stop talking or get upset if they think that you're not paying attention.
3) natural targeting - I'd like to try this but I'm skeptical. What If I want to look where I'm running for a moment? Then my gun careens across the screen.
4) Immersive Graphics and Sound - This is the most interesting one and it has the worst name. This application dynamically focuses and blurs the depth of field of an image as you look around. One of the big problems with 3D immersive tech right now (Real3D, oculus) is that you can't capture this element of natural vision. They usually default to rendering everything as extremely sharp.
I'm surprised they didn't take about typing with your eyes since it's something that eye-tracking is currently used for.
Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming
#3I have worked and work for competitors of Tobii.
The article is kind of biased.
The cheapest eyetracker in the world is The Eye Tribe tracker ( I have worked there). They've not been able to solve the battery drain problem yet (running IR LEDs costs you) and therefore mobile gaming is out. I would assume Tobii has had similar issues. Tobii's EyeX is the only Tobii device cheap enough to go into the consumer market but it cannot do a high resolution head pose estimation at a high frame rate. The other awesome company for eyetracking in Sweden is Smart Eye which is targeting a different industry still has issues with high precision at low frame rates.
In short, eye tracking is important and progressing fast but we aren't where we want to be in terms of using less power and also kind of supplanting the hand controlled devices for typical use cases like aiming in FPS games or changing POV based on head pose. We've used Tobii as part of competition research and the EyeX API is a bit limited also. I would give this article a 7/10.
Edited for clarity.
Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming
#4So 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…
It's not so much about mimicking natural vision at it is to reduce the render target radically, rendering only the small area where you're looking at in good detail while the rest of the image can look like quake 1.
edit: specifically I was thinking about foveated rendering.
Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming
#5I have worked and work for competitors of Tobii. The article is kind of biased. The cheapest eyetracker in the world is The Eye Tribe tracker ( I have worked there). They've not been able to solve the battery drain problem yet (running IR LEDs costs you) and therefore mobile gaming is out. I would assume Tobii has had similar issues. Tobii's EyeX is the only Tobii device cheap enough to go into the consumer market bu…
Is the precision in the current techno good enough to replace the mouse for non-gaming activities, like web browsing or using a classical GUI with buttons and text fields and stuff ? I'd love being able to never ever get my hands off my keyboard.
Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming
#6IMO the bigger change in the short term would be that Depth of Field and "HDR" effects in games could actually work correctly, rather than being unrealistic imitations of videocamera limitations.
Currently, the computer has to guess where you're attention is (e.g always on the crosshair for you weapon/hands) and any attempt to peer elsewhere is punished by unyielding blur and darkness/bloom.
Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming
#7I have worked and work for competitors of Tobii. The article is kind of biased. The cheapest eyetracker in the world is The Eye Tribe tracker ( I have worked there). They've not been able to solve the battery drain problem yet (running IR LEDs costs you) and therefore mobile gaming is out. I would assume Tobii has had similar issues. Tobii's EyeX is the only Tobii device cheap enough to go into the consumer market bu…
Is the precision in the current techno good enough to replace the mouse for non-gaming activities, like web browsing or using a classical GUI with buttons and text fields and stuff ? I'd love being able to never ever get my hands off my keyboard.
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Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming
#8They discuss trying to mimic the focus of real human vision, making the foreground in sharper focus than background and peripheral objects. Why is this necessary? My human vision will do that itself.
For example, if I look at the room I'm in, foreground objects are in sharper focus. If I look at the screen of the computer I'm typing on, if I stare at this letter X, maybe 1-4 letters to each side are in sharp enough focus to read.[1] Why would the computer need to blur the non-foreground images further?
The only guess I have is that objects on a screen are in a false perspective, based on the screen size and the typical user distance from it. Cramming the real world onto a screen that is tiny relative to the immersive real world requires some tricks. But that's just a guess - does anyone know?
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[1] It depends on the font size and probably on resolution too, of course.
Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming
#9They discuss trying to mimic the focus of real human vision, making the foreground in sharper focus than background and peripheral objects. Why is this necessary? My human vision will do that itself. For example, if I look at the room I'm in, foreground objects are in sharper focus. If I look at the screen of the computer I'm typing on, if I stare at this letter X , maybe 1-4 letters to each side are in sharp enough…
It's not just sharpness of focus. There's that, because of - I believe - how densely different areas of our retinas are populated with cones and rods. That's not the same thing that's going on when you look at a tree in front of you, and then the mountains miles away.
The screen is flat. If you were playing a game that occupies 3D space, the game could mimic real depth by changing how it looks depending on where you're looking. It would blur things as they'd be blurred in real life. Or maybe they'd double up things close to us when we look far away, like when you hold a finger in front of your face and then stare far away, or vice-versa. I think we probably rarely notice these things in real life. Maybe this would make it feel magically more real.
Re: How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming
#10Wasn'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?