Eye Tracking Technology Poised to Be Next Trend to Immerse Gamers
From: Queen's University - 08/10/2006

Video-game companies see eye-tracking technology as a potential tool for
enhancing the gaming experience of players. Eye-tracking technology has been
around since the late 1960s, and people with limited mobility, pilots, and
market researchers have largely put the application to good use. According to
a new study from researchers at Queen's University in Canada, playing a game
with your eyes allows gamers to feel more immersed and have more fun in a
virtual environment. School of Computing associate professor Nicholas Graham
and PhD candidate David Smith integrated a Tobii 1750 desktop eye tracker
with several commercial video games, and found that 83 percent of gamers
playing Quake 2 and 92 percent of those playing Neverwinter Nights felt more
immersed in the games using the technology. "Eye-tracking technology allows
us to build interfaces that respond to users' intentions rather than just
their actions," says Smith. Although eye-tracking technology feels more
natural than playing a game with a mouse, the feature presents control issues
because subconscious eye movements make for inadvertent selections of items
or directions. The researchers presented the study at ACM's International
Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology in June. 

Read the entire article at:
http://qnc.queensu.ca/story_loader.php?id=44db496c17ec4

Links:
T.C. Nicholas Graham
http://www.cs.queensu.ca/~graham/

David Smith
http://www.cs.queensu.ca/~smith

Eye Tracking Technology Poised To Be Next Trend To Immerse Gamers
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060818005632.htm
http://www.theallineed.com/computers/06081806.htm

Tobii Eye Tracker
http://www.tobii.com/