Stockholm-based Tobii, a 22-year-old company that is now the undisputed world leader in eye-tracking, made their name even more prominent than usual after explaining Sony’s eye-tracking in PlayStation VR2. That prompted us at Gamereactor to call gaming expert Thomas Papa to find out more about how the collaboration came about, and how they see the gaming world in 2023.
Gamereactor: Tell us about yourself and Tobii.
Papa： My name is Thomas Papa, a game specialist at Tobii, founded in 2001, I work on various game implementations and how our technology can improve and enhance the gaming experience. We currently have 600 employees spread across 13 offices around the world and we currently have the largest patent pool in the world with over 750 international patents related to eye tracking. We provide technology for a variety of industries including research, education, healthcare, automotive and gaming. Tobii’s Gaming division is the smallest of our divisions, currently consisting of 25 people, but our product is currently powered by over 170 games, and this part of our business has grown every year since 2014.
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What do you think is the most important thing about the type of eye tracking you develop?
immersion. Immersion is the key to everything here, and in my opinion, with a lot of games today, our technology allows you to be part of the game itself or the game world, which is hard to describe until you actually test it. Our technology allows games to learn about you as a player in many ways, for example being able to control a game camera with your eye movements or head movements can of course have a big impact on immersion.
We’ve tested The Division 2 with Tobii eye tracking and it works really well.
completely. In this game, we support a feature called “Gaze Cover”, which means that the player seeks cover behind the object he is looking at, and while this may sound inaccurate and arbitrary, it is actually quite the opposite. It simplifies the gameplay, making it more intuitive and improving immersion. For example, in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, we had a system where you could loot boxes by looking at them, and that’s something that players really appreciate. In F1 22, we have a system that makes the game interface of the game invisible to increase the immersion and realism of the game, but if you look at where it is, it is visible. In Star Citizen, we have a system where you choose targets in space battles based on your location, and so on.
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What about the world of sim racing, racing and flying?
We’re going strong there too, with the current goal of expanding and improving our support for various racing games, including Assetto Corsa. We’re currently working with Alpine’s esports team to give their drivers a better chance to position their car ahead of each corner and have an assessment tool that allows their esports coaches to see them using eye tracking Are drivers seeing the right things while actually driving? What we’ve noticed is that experienced professional drivers look at apexes and certain markers or visual cues to confirm what they’ve seen or know, while lay drivers use the same type of information to make certain decisions. choose. Of course, both target groups can benefit greatly from Tobii’s technology.
Here at Gamereactor we’ve been tracking your progress in this sub-genre as we have a dedicated sim racing room with a full size sports rig and we wanted to experiment with head tracking to make our rig’s movements match the in-game The graph is more consistent.
Of course, this is also one of the details that I think can improve the realism and immersion, and we will explain to you of course.
When it comes to PS VR2, your skill is critical to how well the headset works and how well foveated rendering works. What happened when Sony asked you to work on PS VR2?
As I mentioned, we have 13 offices around the world, one of which is in Japan, which is where Sony turned to in the early days of PS VR2, and it was very interesting for us to be a part of that product.