In the future, you may not need a controller to play video games. At CES 2014, Tobii Technology showcased its eye tracking technology that will be featured in an upcoming peripheral from SteelSeries.
The demo we experienced isn’t an exact representation of what we’ll see when the device comes to market, but it simply provides some use case scenarios. After calibrating our eyes, we simply looked left and right to move our character when playing “World of Warcraft.” The technology worked fairly smoothly during our demo. Since we’re not used to moving our eyes back and forth across the screen, it took a little while to get used to the controls.
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We had to move our head in certain scenarios to turn a different direction, but Tobii says that users should be able to simply move their eyes to control the character. We also attacked an enemy by just looking at it to lock on to our target. The device Tobii and SteelSeries are collaborating on isn’t meant to replace mouse and keyboard input, but instead is intended to work with those methods of input. For example, we still had to press buttons to fire at our opponent and to start moving our character.
Overall, the technology worked well but there is a learning curve for new users. The showcase was intended to tease the upcoming possibilities for gamers when SteelSeries launches its eye tracking peripheral in this year.
