Yesterday, I used another of MSI’s Laptops that is actually a new one – and it features some technology that I’d assumed to be a complete gimmick. No, it’s not Virtual Reality (which I’m starting to become quite enamoured with, by the way) – but rather something that I thought was more of a gimmick along the lines of Microsoft’s first Kinect.
But I tried it out …and well, it works. I’m talking about Tobii’s eye-tracking which uses black magic to not just see where you’re facing, but to actually track where you’re looking. It’s built right in to one of MSI’s new laptops, the GT72S. Well, I say new, but it’s really just new-ish – It’s a refresh of a machine released in February, but it’s the first time I’ve been able to go, well, eyes on.
After calibrating a profile of my own (before that, it seems that the system though I was a tad cross-eyed) I was able to run through a few tech demoes that had me shooting laserbeams out of my eyes and blowing up virtual asteroids. You kind of expect tech demoes to work though –so impressed as I was, I didn’t really see the point. Yes, it works with Microsoft’s Windows Hello, but I still didn’t really see the point.
And then I tried it with The Division, which comes as a pack-in game on the GT72S, and is tuned for eye-tracking. You’re able to look around the screen freely just by darting your eyes- so the screen smoothly pans to where you’re looking. Or, if you’d like, you can set it to use your eye location for aiming – which is a bit like cheating, really. Look at an enemy, press your left mouse button and you’ve got a guy with less health than he had before.
If you don’t want to cheat, you can just use it for location. Look at a bit of cover, and hold space to move there. It’s silly, and probably a bit pointless – but it sure as hell does work. I can’t honestly think of any real practical applications for eye-tracking, but it’s pretty damned impressive.
Last Updated: June 1, 2016
Alien Emperor Trevor
June 1, 2016 at 14:32
I’m surprised it works well on such narrow apertures. *run*
Hammersteyn_hates_Raid0
June 1, 2016 at 14:37
http://i947.photobucket.com/albums/ad311/broncos667/Blog/oooooooooh.gif
AfricanTime
June 1, 2016 at 14:41
you could buy a couple of these laptops, and have a competition next week??
Ottokie
June 1, 2016 at 14:47
A message on the phone comes through in the vid. That’s discord I just know it xD
Marco
June 1, 2016 at 16:34
Does it work with Googly Eyes?
Darren Peach
June 1, 2016 at 17:00
Sounds rad. I wonder if this tech will cause some sort of eye fatigue ?