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Engadget goes eyes-on with Tobii EyeAsteroids 3D
While we're busy hounding developers at GDC this week, our sister site Engadget have been over in Germany, rocking the annual CeBIT tech conference. Usually this wouldn't be relevant information to you, dear reader -- we bring this up because Engadget produced a pretty nice video looking at EyeAsteroids.It's, uh, Asteroids you play with your eyes, in case you haven't been paying attention.
Tobii EyeAsteroids 3D lets you destroy virtual space stones with a gaze, we go eyes-on (video)
We've touched and tapped our way through a variety of gadgets at CeBIT, but it's the devices that operate without traditional user interfaces that have really grabbed our focus. Tobii was on-hand to demonstrate its eye-tracking technology earlier this year at CES, but the company is peddling its wares here in Hannover as well, and we decided to drop by for a second look. This time, it's all about gaming, with EyeAsteroids drawing quite a bit of attention on the show floor. The demo pairs Tobii with a SeeFront glasses-free 3D panel for a fairly engaging extraterrestrial shootout. We weren't really sold on the glasses-free 3D, unfortunately, which provides the same unconvincing three-dimensional image from any angle, but Tobii was spot-on, letting us hone in on those infamous space rocks to save our planet from destruction without even raising a finger.Like SeeFront's display, you're able to make visual selections from any angle (within reason) just as easily as you can from directly in front of the panel. There's a seconds-long calibration process each time you start the game, so Tobii can locate your eyes and pair your pupil orientation with a target on the screen. After that, it's open season -- you simply focus on an asteroid to destroy it, and you can add your name to the leader board and navigate menus as well, just as we saw with the Windows 8 demo back at CES. Is this the future of gaming? That remains to be seen, and while the eye-tracking seemed to work just as described, old school gamers will likely prefer tilting a joystick and (violently) tapping on arcade buttons. We still had a lot of fun playing without using our hands, though, as you'll see in our glare-filled demo just past the break.%Gallery-150214%
EyeAsteroids is an arcade cabinet you play with your eyes
EyeAsteroids, an Asteroids clone and frustratingly missed pun opportunity, is an arcade game from Tobii Technology that uses the company's proprietary eye-tracking solutions to recognize where you are looking on the screen, without the use of any other human interfaces. By bouncing invisible infrared lights off of the player's corneas and then monitoring the changes in the reflections generated, the arcade cabinate can extrapolate the eyes' position in 3D space and determine the angle of their gaze."In other words, the eye tracker works much like you would if you face another person and estimate at what they are looking just by observing their eyes," according to Tobii Technology's layman-friendly website. Fifty EyeAsteroid cabinets have been produced at $15,000 a pop, which is roughly the cost of one and a half Street Fighter 4 head-to-head vs. cabinets. If you happen to live in jolly ol' London Towne, an EyeAsteroid cab will be on display at the Trocadero until February 17.
