November 2011 has been an interesting month for eye tracking user interfaces: Tobii announced the release of EyeAsteroid, the world’s first eye-controlled arcade game.

Eye Asteroids is a good PR vehicle Joakim Isaks of Tobii writes;

“EyeAsteroids is more of a novelty and designed to create a ‘wow, this actually works’ reaction when you try it for the first time.”

I remember trying an early Tobii eye tracker integration with Half Life back in 2004 and the ‘wow, this actually works’ experience is palpable.

Meanwhile in the same month De Montford University also released their version of Eye Asteroids with a low cost eye tracker:

There are several academically developed low cost eye trackers but the De Montford one has a fundamental difference; the project is funded by Toby Moores a name that won’t be familiar to many people outside the games industry, but his company is the originator of the best-selling Buzz! series of games published by Sony.

I have real reservations that anyone can make eye tracking part of an integrated user interface as I’ve written about previously, however Joakim makes some great points in his retort and his version of the future is much cooler than mine so I hope he’s right and I’m wrong!

However, if anyone is going to integrate eyetracking into a games console it’s going to be Toby not Tobii.