At CES 2015, video game peripheral company SteelSeries and eye tracking company Tobii unveiled the Sentry. Available now for $200, the Sentry rests on a keyboard and tracks the eye movement of the PC gamer. Some of the top gaming streamers from Twitch were at the SteelSeries suite at The Cosmopolitan hotel and casino, showing off the overlay that allows fans to see exactly what pro gamers are seeing when they play titles like Counter-Strike: GO, DOTA 2 and League of Legends.
Jamie Kieffer, Chief Marketing Officer of SteelSeries
The Sentry also brings emerging professional-level players an entirely new way to train for competitive gaming, by allowing the player to analyze a wide range of statistics based on where and how long he focused, or fixated, on different parts of the screen during gameplay. But that’s just the beginning of the device’s potential, given the number of game developers currently working on games using the $95 Tobii and SteelSeries SDK. Jamie Kieffer, Chief Marketing Officer of SteelSeries, discusses the present and future potential of eye tracking in games in this exclusive interview.
Can you explain how eye tracking works?
As complicated as the underlying technology is, it’s amazingly simple and intuitive to use. The three infrared sensors and camera onboard the Sentry track your eye movements while you play. This simple data can be manipulated in a number of ways. For streamers, their viewers can now watch their gaming sessions and see in real time where the streamer is looking. This provides a new level of insight into gaming strategy — where you look has a lot to do with how you perform. It brings streamers one step closer to their loyal followers.
How can gamers benefit from this technology?
For gamers, the Sentry provides not only a new view for their game replays, but also allows us to capture and report on a lot of key metrics — fixations per minute, percent of time spent in key regions of the gaming screen, etc. By tracking these stats over time and benchmarking against their peers, the data from the Sentry can help gamers set goals for their performance and make real measurable breakthroughs in training.
What else do you see eye tracking opening up?
Ultimately, the possibilities are endless once your computer knows where your eyes are looking. We are working closely with developers to explore opportunities for in-game control using the Sentry, and will have much more news on these opportunities throughout 2015.
How do you see eSports fans using the Sentry?
Sentry is a great training aid for the gamer. For the first time ever, gamers can track their eye movements and measure their performance over time and against competitors. The Sentry tracks fixations per minute — essentially an efficiency measure that tracks how many things a gamer’s eyes perceive in a minute’s time. It also tracks time spent in key areas of the screen — while these are very different from game to game, this data can be incredibly specific and valuable. Are you looking frequently enough at the mini-map in Dota 2 Spending too much time obsessed with your cool down meters in World of WarCraft Track these key stats and train to improve your performance.
Apart from that, a lot of pro gamers also spend a considerable amount of time streaming and discussing their game strategies with their fan bases. The Sentry allows them to provide an entirely new angle for their viewers, tightening the connection between pros and their greatest fans.
What differentiates your Sentry technology from some of the other eye tracking tech at CES?
First off, it’s the first consumer eye tracking device in the world. Quite simply, it’s a world-beating combination of the best eye tracking technology, overlaid with the greatest gaming insight. And a ton of development effort.
First, we partnered with Tobii, who we believe is the undisputed world leader with the greatest track record in innovation in eye tracking technology. Second, we have spent over a year working closely with them to optimize the experience — and the data we collect — for the needs of the streamer and gamer. Everything from the gaze overlay tool to the user interface to the charts and graphs we use to report data has been tested and validated by our stable of pro gamers and our partners in the streaming space.
So we started with the best tools, partnered with the smartest experts, and did everything in true service to the streamer and the gamer.
Why did you decide to focus on the eSports audience for this technology?
A few reasons. They are passionate about their PC usage and the games they play. They are explorers and experimenters, who love to try new methods and technologies to better realize that passion.
They are inherently a “sharing” community, looking to explore new technologies and to share their streams, their gaze data, their stats with each other and their fans.
And, of course, they are the audience that SteelSeries been has obsessed with since our founding. It’s a perfect fit with our mission of making gear to fundamentally improve the gaming experience.
How big an audience is there for this technology given the popularity of eSports and Twitch?
We think it’s massive. ESports is global. It is growing at around 20-30 percent per year. Its fans are passionate and dedicated. There are hundreds of millions of them and it is not uncommon for players to spend 30-40 hours a week committed to their passion.
More than any device, the Sentry impacts all parts of gaming. It makes streaming much more interesting to watch. It helps competitive gamers train and improve their performance. And it will help innovative developers create new methods for immersing gamers more fully into their worlds.
How far away are we from allowing gamers to actually play via eye tracking (What type of developer support would be needed )?
Not far at all. In partnership with Tobii, we have had development kits in the industry for well over a year. At CES this year, we are showing a number of immersive gaming experiences already developed — all of which show the true power and potential of the game. We are working very closely with major development studios and we anticipate some major announcements on this front in the very near future.
