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.

Are private servers for currently-running massive multiplayer games illegal? It depends a lot on your interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Blizzard has won battles in court against "emulated servers", but it seems that other publishers have no problem with fans running their own private servers as long as they are for free.

The game that has one of the larger followings of private servers is Lineage II. It has had decent success here in the US, but it's much more popular in the developers' native country of South Korea and in other countries in Asia. With an anime style and a brutal levelling curve (where months of play, even at eight hours per day, won't even put you close to the maximum attainable level), it satisfies both the tastes and need for challenge that Korean players have. But in the US, many players found the game's incredibly long "grind" just way too much to swallow - and those who love PvP aren't happy with the fact that even PvP deaths in Lineage II result in a considerable XP loss (even if someone much higher level than you kills you in a single hit).