What can it do currently?

[Keith]

Hi,

I am aware that the tobii eye X is a “developers product”.

I not a developer. I have a lot of pain in my muscles and tendinitis all over my body and find a mouse and keyboard to be painful.

The key attraction to the Tobii eye X is its price point as I can’t afford the significantly more expensive alternatives.

I would be primarily looking at it for use in games. I have seen some videos and a blog about using it for games in its current form.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JamesCoote/20140908/225122/Its_in_the_Eyes.php

I’m just wondering if you can tell me exactly what is possible with it at the moment with games that don’t have official support? I understand that there is a big difference between emulated mouse movement and a game that has been created specifically to take advantage of eye controls.

For RTS games if I look at the edges of the screen will it scroll in that direction automatically even if the RTS game is not programmed to do that? I.e. with mouse emulation? Or will the mouse cursor simply hover near the edge of the screen and not go over the edge that causes it to scroll? I realise that it’s not super accurate for less than 2 cm but if you can scroll around the map with emulated mouse mode then for selecting individual units I could zoom the camera in with a voice activated command to make the units bigger and easy to select. Would this be possible in its current format?

What I don’t think is available yet and I’m not sure if it would be hard to program or even possible as I’m not a programmer would be having barely visible (or even invisible if the user wants it that way) user programmable buttons at the edges of the screen for example up down left and right and in each corner. For an RTS game you could set these as the arrow keys and if you wanted to scroll in a particular direction just look there. Same for FPS except bind them to WASD. Or you could utilise macros or whatever particular binding the user would like. For example some people have trouble selecting grenades in shooters as they’re not regular players and maybe a little uncoordinated :-). Simply create the binding for the button at the top of the screen to be select a HE grenade and the one at the bottom of the screen for flash grenade. A quick look up or a quick look down and your sorted.

In essence creating an overlay on top of the game that executes whatever command the user wants when it is activated by simply looking at it. Perhaps you could even create these buttons anywhere in the game that you wished and as many as would fit. Making it so the user could anchor the button anywhere on the screen. So in counterstrike instead of pressing the key for the bomb you could look at the invisible button that you anchored in the area of the screen where the bomb icon appears and it pulls out the bomb for you to plant. Obviously you would need to be able to save separate profiles for separate games.

Just something that came to mind. Not sure if it’s even possible??????????
Maybe not because if I can think of it you probably already have? Not sure if I communicated it well enough for others to understand but to me if it works even half as well as I imagine it could then it would be fantastic even for people without health problems or disabilities.

[dfjkosfsdklöfksdlösfd]

Basicly it is theoretically possible what you wish and I also had an idea in that kind.

But after testing with Tobii now for few days I realized that this is not good enough to do but it possible of course!

The accuracy is mighty but still for Gaming it requires a huge amount of accuracy which Tobii does need and does not have right now atm!

The commands take minimum 1 second!

For gaming this is too much. Genuine mouse commands with hand need less than 100 ms!

So to be clear: This is NOT flexible nor “pleasant”!

Actually you have to programm for every game a special Overlay. Most FPS are luckily the same so there is not much work to do. Maybe you can do a Button remap for this special TOBII GAMING HUD yourself. But you would need profiles for every own game. 😉

[Robert [Tobii]]

Hi Keith,

At the moment there are no games that support Eye interaction out-of-the-box, except the ones that have implemented explicit support for it. The Gamasutra link you referred to talks about a game jam where developers used the Tobii EyeX SDK to build new games based on eye-gaze interaction. I know that there are developers working with different methods to integrate it into games, either by changing mouse position, emulating button presses or hooking deeper into the game process. We have done some demos at Tobii as well, but not created any product (yet).

Thank you for your ideas regarding integration into games. In general, to make the most out of the eye tracker data when playing games, we recommend developers to combine the gaze data with some other input. For example, one developer has combined the eye tracker with an XBox controller to be able to fine-tune mouse movements and trigger mouse clicks.
http://developer.tobii.com/community/forums/topic/gaming-and-desktop-mouse-control-with-the-rex/

As this developer community evolves, we expect to see much more integrations of this kind.

[Stephen]

Hi, any thoughts on offline calibration using the gaze SDK and how to save the calibration?

[Grant [Tobii]]

hi @stevo,

I’m afraid I don’t see the relation between your question (which I don’t fully understand) and the current topic.

Th means to save calibrations is well documented in the developer guide, but what do you mean by ‘offline calibration’ ?

Thanks for the clarification.

[Author]

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