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.

So much has been said about Resistance: Fall of Man over the course of the last twelve months that your opinion has likely already been influenced one way or another. That's the folly of journalism - you're just one voice amongst the masses. What make IGN a little different is that we can take different angles within the site; each region can cover any game and apply any mark - within reason of course. For Resistance, the US clearly loved the title, giving it a very generous 9.1. The UK were a little less convinced by the experience (a respectable 8.0), and having logged a lot of hours into both the single and multiplayer components of the game, we tend to side with them.
Resistance is a good game; really good in fact. We enjoyed the story - an alternate, early 1950s encounter with aliens who are spreading outwards from Russia, slowly infecting the population and wreaking havoc as they move. We enjoyed the typically brilliant weapons - a trademark of Insomniac Games' other series, Ratchet & Clank. We savoured the 40-player multiplayer games, where chaos reigned and bullets rained. But the whole of Resistance, the overall experience of playing the final game, just doesn't blow our collective skirts up the way we hoped it would.