A fiendishly difficult video game that tracks a player鈥檚 eyes to make enemies appear where a player is least likely to see them has been developed by Canadian researchers.
They designed the game to test ideas about how eye movements betray where our attention is focused.
鈥淲e could make it harder if we presented important game-related items where we didn鈥檛 think people were paying attention,鈥� says , a computer vision researcher at McGill University in Montreal.
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That approach means players cannot learn to expect baddies in particular locations. They always appear in the area of the screen a gamer is least aware of.
Fixed focus
It is easy to track eye movements using small cameras that follow the movement of a person鈥檚 pupils. But Clark and colleague Li Jie knew that the place someone鈥檚 eyes are pointing at is not always the place they are most aware of.
To learn how to predict where a person鈥檚 attention was focused, the pair tested subjects鈥� reactions to an image suddenly appearing on the computer screen under different circumstances.
The experiments showed two things. First, when someone is looking at a fixed point in a complex part of a scene, they find it harder to divert their attention to a new object. Second, the researchers confirmed previous research suggesting that when looking at a moving object, people tend to focus their attention slightly ahead of it.
Those results were used to design a first-person shoot 鈥檈m up game that could choose to make enemies appear in places where they would be either easy or hard to see. The game tracks a player鈥檚 eyes to work out areas they are paying most, and least, attention to.
Helicopter rescue
Gamers had to avoid missiles, fireballs, and other enemy objects, while trying to shoot an opponent. When enemies were placed away from a player鈥檚 area of focus, scores went down significantly.
The research could be used to design harder video games, says Clark, especially if games eventually come packaged with eye tracking devices. Some games companies are already investigating using them as a way of controlling games.
Even without eye-tracking, the work demonstrates a new way to think about designing games to control how players notice enemies and other features.
But Clark adds his main interest is in using the attention technique to make things easier, not harder. For example, head-up displays for helicopter rescue pilots that would put vital information in easy-to-see places and less important information where it wouldn鈥檛 be distracting, he says.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 a good one,鈥� says , a vision researcher at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. 鈥淚鈥檝e been talking about this as a possible approach. It鈥檚 good to see someone has made it happen. If you can predict attention, you can improve performance.鈥�
A paper on the McGill research will appear in a future edition of .
