Eye tracking has – for quite a while – attracted game researchers to use this exciting technology to interact with new media, especially games, since from a viewpoint of game accessibility, it opens gaming up to people with severe motor disabilities. At the COGAIN conference in May, we have presented a paper with results from our 2007 study.

We have tested this exciting gaze interaction technology with a game mod created for the game Half-Life 2 (Valve Corporation), in which the players’ task was to successfully navigate through a labyrinthine boardwalk area. This was not just some fun and easy design, but we wanted to challenge players and use eye tracking as a successful game mechanic, which the later evaluation supported. About 30 players participated at Swedish computer game festival Dreamhack. Preferences of mouse or gaze interaction was checked as well as positive or negative gameplay experience. The results show low tension and negative affects scores as well as high positive challenge, immersion and flow ratings.

The correlation between spatial presence and immersion for gaze interaction was high and is something we are investigating further. Other gaze gaming researchers from the COGAIN conference presented a very promising approach to gaze gestures and the positive press coverage they receive shows that gaze gaming is definitely a growing trend to watch, be it for making games more accessible or to simply try out novel methods of interacting with a computer game, which Project Natal shows it something of interest for the game industry as well.

Reference
Nacke, L., Stellmach, S., Sasse, D., Lindley, C. A. (2009). Gameplay Experience in a Gaze Interaction Game. In The 5th Conference on Communication by Gaze Interaction – COGAIN 2009: Gaze Interaction For Those Who Want It Most (pp. 49-54). Lyngby, Denmark: The COGAIN Association.

Some more videos concerned with game accessibility

(Should have posted this a while ago, but since it is quite a busy summer, I thought better post it now than never.)

Only time for a short post:

Three eye tracking events you should watch out for in 2009

1. The 15th European Conference on Eye Movements (ECEM 2009) takes places from 23rd – 27th August 2009 at the University of Southampton in the UK. Definitely more an industry event, abstracts of only 200 words have to be handed in by March 31, 2009.
2. The 5th COGAIN Annual Conference on Communication by Gaze Interaction (COGAIN 2009) – “Gaze Interaction For Those Who Want It Most” takes place on May 26, 2009 at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in Lyngby, Denmark. Three-page (~1500 words) short papers can be handed in until 28th of February 2009.
3. The Scandinavian Workshop of Applied Eye-Tracking 2009 (SWAET) takes place from 6th-7th of May 2009 in Stavanger, Norway. Presentation abstract (3000 chars) can be handed in until March 15, 2009.

The Research Paper

Based on collaborative work between Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden and Otto-von-Guericke University, Germany, we recently published a paper on the integration of game metrics logging with biometric measures (as well as eye tracking). It was titled “Log Who’s Playing: Psychophysiological Game Analysis Made Easy through Event Logging” and is available in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS 5294/2008) book series (ISBN: 978-3-540-88321-0) by Springer Verlag. The paper was based partly on recent distinguished student work (published in the Game Career Guide) conducted within the FUGA project and in the Game and Media Arts Lab. I thought, it would a good opportunity to share the slides from the presentation last year on this blog.

The Research Presentation

More Information on Game Metrics

In my course game systems engineering, I also recently talked a little bit about game metrics, so I thought, I could add the slides here as well.

Background Information

When going on the prowl for a new article, the young academic researcher, who is not too familiar with all the big names, research venues and journals typically starts their research looking the desired topic up in books, wikipedia (or other dictionaries) and most recently also in blogs (which happen to be increasingly written by academics in their spare time). Since I started adapting that practice a while ago for fields in which I lack proficiency, I thought why not share this idea. As an academic, you usually often want to give back to the community that nurtures you. Therefore, I would like to present my top ten of blogs that deal with eye tracking (often in a research context). It has to be noted that such a list is always highly subjective and may only be to my own gusto. If your blog is not on that list and you feel it should be, feel free to leave your URL and a comment. Without further ado, here goes my personal top ten:

The Top Ten List

1. Martin Tall on Gaze Interaction. Martin is a PhD student in HCI at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark and blogs about all things related to eye tracking and gaze interaction. Very inspiring and personal.
2. COGAIN. This is not so much a blog as more of news site from the Communication by gaze interaction researchers. This is where you find relevant conferences and articles on gaze interaction. Good starting place for researchers.
3. Eyetracking. Set your strategy. Unfortunately, this Chilean blog from Research AyerViernes is in Spanish, however you can let Google translate it for you automatically. Especially interesting to industry.
4. Eye tracking for behavioral analysis. A French company blog from Pertech (which you can also translate to English) shares funny articles and news from the world of eye tracking.
5. This ain’t no game! Samuel Almeida, who recently contacted me about my game usability slides, blogs about his thesis project “Eye movement analysis for augmenting video game development”, which is delightful and interesting. Good luck on your project, Samuel.
6. Eye Tools Blog. This is a blog about “design and content optimization through eye tracking” from the eye tools company, which has not been updated for a while.
7. The Eye Tracking Blog. Lots of short, incomplete information related to eye tracking. Older articles sometimes provide no references to the news stories. Unfortunately, the blog has a very anonymous feel to it as no authors are referenced, it almost feels like it is written by a search spider that regularly crawls google for eye tracking stuff.
8. Yellow Line. Matteo Penzo, who worked with eye tracking at the University of Rome before 2007, still has a few pieces of his work on his blog.
9. User Interface Engineering. Again, not really a blog, but a company site that has a few articles related to eye tracking.
10. Feng GUI. A blog about a crazy technology to generate eye tracking heatmaps without eye tracking. Amazing, geeky and interesting.

Let’s not forget that you can always come back here and read my articles about eye tracking.

It is becoming more popular to integrate eye trackers directly with EEG acquisition hardware (and software). As the company Advanced Neuro Technology reports, they have now created a real-time system integration of their ASA-LAB with Tobii eye trackers.

Now, this sounds really excellent as the two systems now also share event information (for example trigger data), which makes analysis even one step easier. Nevertheless, it would be really interesting to know whether application of an EOG becomes unnecessary as blink information (which shows as an artefact on the EEG recordings and has to be eliminated before analysis) could be received from the eye tracker directly.

Nevertheless on the website it still says that EOG could be acquired and related to other psychophysiological data (like EMG, respiration and GSR). It also seems that any processing and transformation of the data (like FFT or such) cannot be done in real-time and it postprocessed for analysis. I kind of hope that Biosemi, whose ActiveTwo system we are currently using, are catching on to the trend and in combination to the Jazz eye tracker support they already provide, add support for the IMHO superior Tobii systems.