New Assassin’s Creed Game Lets You Control With Your Eyes

Steve McCaskill,
Illustration from Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed video game

Eye-tracking technology looks to give players a more intense and immersive gaming experience

Video gamers looking for a truly immersive experience will soon able to exert even more control over their virtual heroes thanks to new eye-tracking technology.

A new version of Assassin’s Creed: Rogue for PC released today gives gamers the ability to control the central character with their eyes.

Assassin's_Creed_RogueOn point

This is down to SteelSeries Sentry, the world’s first gaming eye tracker, being bundled with the new game. Used alongside traditional keyboard and mouse inputs, Sentry will mirror the direction of the user’s gaze onto the game’s protagonist, Shay Patrick Cormac.

For example, as the player looks to the left of screen, Shay will look to the left of his environment and the scene camera will pan to accommodate the exploration of this new visual territory creating what its inventors say is an “Infinite Screen” experience.

The technology will also facilitate several other gameplay functions, such as ‘Multidimensional Movement’, where the traditional controls are used to shoot in one direction while Sentry uses the player’s gaze to focus and throw an object, such as a grenade, in another.

Characters in the game will also react based on eye contact from the player, just as they would in real life, and the environmental elements of the game will also react with animation or sound based on eye contact from the player.

Eye-catching

“Eye tracking is such a natural way to interact with a game and creates tons of potential opportunities for gameplay immersion,” said Corneliu Vasiliu, producer at Ubisoft Kiev.

“We are one of the first to integrate this technology in a video game, and the first to implement eye tracking as a gameplay input in a game of that scale – providing Assassin’s Creed Rogue gamers with an entirely new, complementary input to the keyboard and mouse. We recognized the power of eye tracking early and were quick to work with Tobii to create a completely new way to experience a game.”Tobii_SteelSeries

The game ships in March, but the first 5,000 customers who sign up to purchase Sentry will receive a free copy.

“This is only the beginning of eye-tracking in gaming. It is an important step in Tobii’s long term vision to create a strong ecosystem of games and apps that use eye tracking to create even more immersive experiences”, said Oscar Werner, president of Tobii Tech.

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