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Home / News / Next Big Thing – eye-controlled games

Next Big Thing – eye-controlled games

Give video game enemies the evil eye with this new eye-tracking technology

What’s this? Kinect for the lazy?

Quite possibly. The Swedish eggheads at Tobii usually use their infra-red eyeball tracking tech to help the disabled communicate but now they want to bring it to gaming. To get the (eye) ball rolling they’ve made a coin-op game called EyeAsteroids, the world’s first look ‘em up.

People still make coin-op games? Wow. Tell me more.

You have to zap incoming asteroids that threaten the Earth by giving them the evils. It does track eye movements with impressive precision but it’s got to be said the game’s more likely to induce some shuteye. But Tobii see it as a proof of concept – with a £10k price tag – and are plotting to bring eye control gaming to the home.

So what can we look forward to if that happens?

We could get football games where you select who to pass to by looking at them before pressing the pass button. Games could also react to where you’re looking, so in a future Red Dead Redemption staring at someone in a saloon might spark a fight.

The downside though is that the tracker in EyeAsteroids doesn’t do TV-to-sofa so at present it’s more suited for desktop or laptop computer games.

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Profile image of Dan Grabham Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home