Gaze beats mouse - a case study

Michael Dorr, Martin Böhme, Thomas Martinetz, and Erhardt Barth

Eye tracking has become cheaper and more robust over the last years. Soon it will be feasible to deploy eye tracking in the mass market. One application area in which an average consumer might benet from eye tracking is in computer games, where gaze direction can add another dimension of input. Progress in this direction will also be of high relevance to disabled users who lack the dexterity to control the input modalities traditionally used in computer games. Not only could gaming with gaze be enjoyable in itself, but the virtual world of multi-player games might also be one arena where disabled users could meet non-disableds on an equal footing.

However, for a satisfactory gaming experience, it does not suce to simply replace the mouse with a gaze cursor; usually, changes to the game play will also have to be made.

In this paper, we will present an open-source game that we adapted so that it can be controlled by either a mouse or by gaze direction. We will show results from a small tournament that indicate that gaze is an equal if not  superior input modality for this game.

Paper in pdf

Video recording of the talk (online soon)

Source code and a binary