I Played Asteroids With My Eyes
Tobii's eye-tracking technology was out in force at a CES 2012 press event last night, where the company let journalists play an arcade game with their eyes.
LAS VEGAS – Last year, we looked at Swedish company Tobii's eye-tracking control system on a Lenovo notebook. It was a proof-of-concept device that used an infrared sensor to measure where the user's eyes were positioned and looking. Its applications are varied and obvious. It could be a great boon for users with disabilities, it could make interacting wiith productivity applications much faster by adding a new method of control, and it could make games really cool. Tobii proves that last part with Eye Asteroids, a demonstration game that usees the eye-tracking system to aim at asteroids and other hazards, destroying them with lasers aimed with your eyes. At a CES preiew event last night, I tried Eye Asteroids and was thoroughly impressed.
Like most unique control systems, the Tobii system had to be calibrated first. I sat still and stared at dots on the screen, and the sensor measured my eyes' movements at each position. After measuring five spots, the system calibrated and started the game.
Eye Asteroids is a very simple version of the classic arcade game Asteroids, making the user destroy asteroids as they fly around the screen, before they can hit their ship or planet. In Eye Asteroids, the planet automatically fired at asteroids as soon as I looked at them. Very literally, my eyes guided a death ray that destroyed floating rocks. Each one I focused on exploded under the power of my optical vengeance.
Menu navigation was also controlled by my eyes, and I pressed buttons and scrolled through letters by looking at them. The process was surprisingly intuitive, and I easily got to level seven in the game and entered my initials in the high score menu.
After the rise and tepid continuation of motion control over the last few years, I'm not ready to say any control system is the next big thing. However, I was very impressed by Tobii, and I could see eye-tracking menu navigation becoming very popular. Tobii will begin getting use in professional applications like CAD and medical services in the next year, and is expected to see its first consumer products in two to three years.