Review: Tobii EyeX in regards to The Division and Suggestions for improvement

[Kevin McDonnell]

Feature: Enable eye focus on hud elements

In Game Description: Fade out hud elements while not being focused upon

Boiled Down Description: Basically this feature turns the opacity down on UI elements that you are not looking at, when you glance at say, the mini-map or the EXP bar, it will bring the mini-map back to 100% opacity.

Opinions and Thoughts: I enjoy this feature a lot, but it needs some tweaking. Having your UI elements fade into the background is very nice and helps with immersion a lot. There are however a couple tweaks I would recommend. 1st and foremost break this feature up into the different UI elements and allow me to leave my Party at 100% opacity at all times while still fading the other UI elements. I need my party’s health bars and skill cooldowns to be completely visible at all time. So the settings for this would evolve to look something like this:

Enable eye focus on hud elements:
Minimap ON/OFF
XP Bars ON/OFF
Chat Panel ON/OFF
Group Panel ON/OFF

The evolved setting options would have individual toggles for each UI element. This would allow the user to select which UI elements fades and which ones did not.

An additional idea would be to allow us to change the “fade opacity %” for each UI element individually.

Feature: Enable map eye tracking

In Game Description: Turn the Tobii eye tracking control on the megamap on or off

Boiled Down Description: It seems to me that all this feature does is highlight missions as you look at them. If there are additional features I missed with this setting please let me know.

Opinions and Thoughts: What is the intended use of this feature? Honestly… I know that when you look at missions it highlights them, but that is it. There is no real use or advantage over a mouse, and you still need to use a mouse to select a mission or mark a waypoint. The only saving grace of this feature could be found in fast traveling. It is nice for when you want to fast travel you can glance at your BoO and hit X, then space. No mouse work necessary. All in all I would say this is a little bit of a useless feature at the current moment.

Feature: Enable eye tracking for aiming and cover

In Game Description: When aiming the weapon reticle and arcs for abilities and grenades start at your point of focus, additionally while in cover, looking at other objects brings up the covers swap indicator

Boiled Down Description: So there are essentially three to four features grouped into this one setting. You have the following:

1. Aiming the reticle where you are looking
-When you ADS (aim down sights) your reticle will automatically reposition (snap) itself to exactly where you looking, this makes having to preaim before you ADS obsolete.

2. Aiming grenade arcs where you are looking
-This feature is just as it reads, it will place the grenade arc where you are looking on the screen.

3. Aiming ability arcs where you are looking
-This feature is just as it reads, it will place the ability arc where you are looking on the screen.

4. While in cover, looking at other objects brings up the covers swap indicator
-This feature allows the user to select a new cover to swap to with just your eyes, then hit spacebar to rodeo run over to the new cover swap location. All without moving your reticle.

Opinions and Thoughts:

1. Aiming the reticle where you are looking
-I found that this feature was hit and miss. I am a long time gamer and MMO player and as such I have found that I may not always be looking exactly where I want the reticule to aim into when I ADS (aim down sights). I noticed there were times where I would glance at the minimap at the same time I was ADS and the reticle would sharply snap upwards to the sky to aim where the minimap was. This has shown me that this feature is one I would like to turn off. Long time gamers develop the ability to refer to different information on the screen and your eyes are very likely not looking exactly where you would like to aim.
-I also found that the calibration is not as precise as I would like it. It is close but not perfect.
-I found that over long play sessions I tend to slouch or lean back, the reticule started aiming lower and lower on the enemies body until I was snap aiming to their feet. Maybe this is due to my not so ergonomic desk chair but worth a note none the less.

2. Aiming grenade arcs where you are looking
-This feature worked ok. It seemed to place the grenade arcs closer to me than I felt they should have been. I think this feature just needs a little adjustment and it would work fine.

3. Aiming ability arcs where you are looking
-This feature worked very similar to the grenade arcs. It seemed to place the ability arcs closer to me than I felt they should have been. I think this feature just needs a little adjustment and it would work fine. I will admit that I need to do further testing with the sticky mine as I did not fully vet that ability.

4. While in cover, looking at other objects brings up the covers swap indicator
-Ok, so in my opinion this is the feature that shines the most with the Tobii EyeX. Being able to select a new cover to swap to with just your eyes in the middle of a firefight while shooting is simply amazing. As long as I am in cover, the swap cover mechanic will be located with where I am looking.

Like I did with the UI elements setting this setting needs to be broken down into separate features that can be toggled independently. Why these features were grouped is beyond me. The breakdown should be as follows:

Enable eye tracking for aiming and cover:
-Aim the reticle where you are looking ON/OFF
-Grenade arcs aim where you are looking ON/OFF
-Ability arcs aim where you are looking ON/OFF
-Look at other objects to bring up the cover swap indicator ON/OFF

Conclusion: When all is said and done I think Tobii and Steelseries have a great product that can only get better as time passes and updates occur. When explaining the eye tracker to a co-worker I even went so far as to say that I believe this may be the next step in gaming interaction, not VR. The unit is not to expensive at around $150.00 and works very well for a first generation product. When I first booted up the setup software and went through calibration I was more or less blown away by how well it worked.

Formatting on this forum is a bit difficult so I apologize for any confusion. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thank you for reading!

Respectfully,
Kevin

[Henrik [Tobii]]

Thanks you for taking the time to write such well structured feedback. Much appreciated.

[Conley]

Since this was so well written i wanted to throw in the fact that when reading certain descriptions, or mission reviews in game and on map/matchmaking it fades because the focal point for your eye is not where the text is at for you to read.

[Simon [Tobii]]

Hi Kevin, and thanks for your feedback!

I think your feedback is very well written and thought through. There’s a couple of things I’d like to point out:

A mouse will always be faster and more precise than the eye tracker. Some of the features (such as the megamap-feature and aim at gaze) are done mainly with a gamepad in focus. They still work with a mouse and keyboard but the experience is much more well suited for the gamepad.

Unfortunately the eye tracker requires that you remain within the track-area. If you’re a chair-sloucher (as myself), I tend to tilt my monitor down a bit before going into gaming mode. That way it can keep tracking me even when I lean back / slouch down a bit.

I will try to push some of the suggestions that you’ve made to the developers. There’s no promises that it’ll make it through (since we have a couple of bugs that have higher priority), but ultimately it’s up to wether or not they have time to do the changes or not!

Many thanks,
Simon

[Ludwig]

Hello,

The comments from Kevin are well done but I would disagree with EyeX being a great product. It is nice and if you get a discount and have the money to spare go for it.

My main problem is that calibration is something that Tobii needs to work on at the highest priority. The accuracy is more hit than miss. I do get gute used to that the cross hairs snap in the general direction where I am looking. The pre aim is indeed gone, only to be replaced by adjusting the aim after you pressed the button for ADS.
I am not sure if snapping in the general direction and subsequent adjustment is better than pre-aim. This is only relevant if you are in cover, doing pre-aim you are in cover, while ADS exposes you. With per-aim you know in which direction you would need to adjust, while with gaze to aim you will only know after you pressed ADS.

I stringy agree that when looking at HUD elements some aiming should be disabled. I have it happen that during some fights I shoot, get back in cover (I do not move the mouse so circle stays in the general direction of the enemy) glance at bullets in mag and if OK go back to shooting. At that point my aim snaps to somewhere behind my XP bar. aim lost, big adjustment needed and I am exposed. But this i think would be on Massive side to fix.

I would also love that if I look at the area of the general circle gaze aim would be disabled. I can see that tracking is not always nicely grouped but being a rather wide area. This would reduce some “jumpiness”.

I am not sure how deep Tobii is involved in the tracking programming for the division but in the boo there is a shooting range with pop-up targets. It would be great if that could be used for refine in game calibration.

To finalize my comments: this could really be nice but since there is currently no way to adjust calibration I do not recommend this to my friends. I had some asking. I also would advise that the second generation product will include an ambient light sensor. Currently I have about three calibration profiles to be used with different light situations in my room.

EyeX is promising and I hope you will improve on the software rather fast to improve usefulness.

Regards
Ludwig

[Author]

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