Gaming and Eye Tracking: Gameplay Experience in a Gaze Interaction Game

by The Acagamic

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.)

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