andersto's comments

5)“Eye fatigue comes in pretty quickly” - we don’t want you to do anything differently, but play as naturally as possible since the eye tracker is monitoring your eye movements. So there is really NO NEED to stay perfectly still, blink or be unnaturally close to the screen.

6)"Use gaze to control the camera pivot -- That sounds incredibly annoying.” - We understand the doubts but we are pretty confident that you might have a different opinion after trying it out! A gamespot reporter did the same:http://l.gamespot.com/1Mm7rar

7)“Making the foreground in sharper focus than background and peripheral objects. Why is this necessary?” - We want allow your normal human vision to exist within the game based on your natural focus to allow for real depth instead of a flat screen. @teckromancr @blakecaldwell and @tdaltonc got it right!

8)"Is it sad that all I see this turning into is REALLY annoying ads in streaming apps?"/"I do not look forward to advertisements using this technology.” - We have no intentions of making ads from eye tracking! We also have SDK agreements based on not allowing infringement of privacy. Its been 15 years in eye tracking for Tobii so personal integrity is something we take extremely seriously.

So if any of you want to try out the tracker, all you have to do is tweet "let me try @tobiieyex via #hackernews!” and we will DM you for your details. The first 10 individuals to tweet it within 48 hours will get our latest Tobii EyeX shipped right to you, free of charge. All we want is for you to really play/test it out for yourself. We have not done this with any other community before but hacker news is pretty special to us!

Hey, I am working with Tobii and I saw this thread so let me try to give some background info about the Tobii EyeX to answer some of the questions in this thread.

We really value the community and comments at Hacker News and we know there are equal amounts of excitement and doubts about eye tracking and I am gonna have a quick giveaway of 10 EyeX sets here in the next 48 hours as well so that some of you can experience it first hand! More on that below but here is some information:

First off, we are not in a position to comment on products from other eye tracking companies globally, nor would we want to speak for them. So I am picking a few key issues here to discuss.

1)"Battery Drain issue" – The battery drain issue is probably more skewed towards mobile gaming and not for desktop/laptops and we are seeing little to no difference in battery drain when playing games with/without our eye tracker.

2)"Supplanting the hand controlled devices for aiming or changing POV” - We don’t intend to replace mice, keyboards or even to compete with them, but enhance the gaming experience with as natural interactions as possible. We already play games looking at the screen, and we can make your eyes a useful component of gameplay.

3)“Cannot do a high-res head pose estimation at high frame rate” - We are focused on eye tracking and have elements of head tracking but it is mainly on the point of gaze instead.

4)“Is the precision in the current tech good enough to replace the mouse for non-gaming activities?, web browsing or using a classical GUI with buttons and text fields and stuff” - Technically it is possible for similar levels of accuracy, but our intention was always to use it in combination with other modalities. We have plenty of people in the office who have become much less reliant on a mouse with the eye tracker but natural, learned interaction is not at a hands-free stage at the moment.