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| svickers@dmu.ac.uk
| GH4.52, Centre for Computational Intelligence, Dept of
Informatics, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH |
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| These
are the main projects that Howell Istance
and myself are currently working on within the Centre for
Computational Intelligence! |
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Low-cost Eye Tracking as a Commercial
Gaming Device
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| This
project was supported by the European Regional Development
Agency Innovation Fellowship Scheme. Using your eyes and
where you are looking to interact with computer games
represents an exciting new direction that game play can
take, following the success of whole body interaction
enabled by the Kinect and the Wii. The Innovation
Fellowship has supported the development and demonstration
of a low-cost eye tracker by De Montfort University, in
collaboration with Sleepy Dog, the East Midlands games
company that produced the Buzz-it controller and games.
The low-cost eye tracker was produced as a fully working
pre-production prototype. In the project, three different
games were produced to demonstrate different ways in which
eye gaze can be used to make game play more immersive and
exciting. |
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Eye-gaze Interaction with Online Games and Virtual Environments for Users with Severe Physical Disabilities |
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Online virtual
worlds and games have much to offer users with severe
motor disabilities. While the appearance of the user's
avatar may not reveal the disability of the person that
controls it, the behavior and speed or interaction in
the world may do.
Many
users with severe motor impairments may not be able to
operate a keyboard or hand mouse and may also struggle
with speech and head movement. Eye gaze is one method of
interaction that has been used successfully in enabling
access to desktop environments. However, simply
emulating a mouse using eye gaze is not sufficient for
interaction in online virtual worlds.
This
genre of gaming (MMORPG's) is constantly evolving and
regardless of the aim of the game they all involve
common tasks such as, avatar creation, social
interaction (chatting, IM), interaction with in world
objects (pick up, open, shoot etc), navigating and
walking around the environment. This research involves
analyzing common tasks so that suitable gaze based
interaction techniques to support them can be used in
place of a mouse and keyboard. These will have different
performance/effort trade-offs, and will include extended
mouse/joystick emulation, gaze gestures, toolglasses and
gaze-aware in-world objects. These techniques are to be
integrated into a coherent and efficient user interface
suited to the needs of an individual user with a
particular disability. The research aims to model tasks
inherent in using these worlds so that predictions can
be made about the most appropriate gaze based
interaction techniques to use. When these have been
identified, they can be assembled into a front end or
user interface. One possible outcome could be a software
device for automatic configuration of a gaze-control
interface for new games, which could use knowledge of a
specific user's disability and the eye tracking
equipment that they have.
You
can find out more on this project by reading some of the
papers and my PhD thesis which can be found here.
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