A Queen’s University study confirms that video-gamers feel more immersed and have more fun in virtual environments when they play with commercial eye tracking technology.

These “new controls” replace the mouse click as a means to allow players to interact more naturally with their digital environments.

"Eye tracking technology allows us to build interfaces that respond to users' intentions rather than just their actions. This makes computers feel more natural than ever before," says the study’s co-author David Smith a PhD candidate with Queen’s School of Computing.

First developed in the late 1960s the technology, already used by people with limited mobility, pilots, and market researchers, is increasingly attracting the interest of video-game companies.

This study, also authored by the School of Computing’s Associate Professor Nicholas Graham, showed that players enjoyed the way eye tracking enhanced their involvement in the role-playing game Neverwinter Nights. However, players still preferred to use the mouse to control games like Quake 2, a first-person shooter game, and Lunar Command, an action/arcade game.

Players overwhelmingly indicated an increased feeling of immersion in the gaming world when they played with the eye tracker – 83 percent of those playing Quake 2, 83 percent playing Neverwinter Nights, and 92 percent playing Lunar Command. Smith and Graham suggest this is due to an increased level of feedback, which is given even when the user makes subconscious eye movements.

If you've ever felt compelled to watch a guy in a cheeseburger suit race a tiny motorcycle, this is the appropriate game. As a Mario Kart style game, this is a good substitute featuring both online and offline multiplayer. One of the interesting differences between this game and Mario Kart is that instead of collecting power-ups in the usual fashion, you instead go through gates which give you power that can be transferred into either one of several power-ups or boost at any time. This trade-off really changes the strategy from the usual Mario Kart style of play. The single player is abysmal though, as AI opponents do not even attempt to compete in non-racing modes! In fact at various points I've seen the bots racing around the course backwards, and piling up all together. Of course the flip side to the poor AI is that this turns out to be the easiest of the three BK games to get achievements with. So long as you can follow the course and get used to the control scheme, you'll be set. Unfortunately this game also seems to suffer from the most bugs as it is the most complicated. However some design choices just seem awful. Why won't Pocket Bike Racer remember which camera choice I make between races?