My goal is to use Tobii 4C Eye Tracker to achieve a not looking fade effect for UI elements. Imagine you dont look at your minimap, and as a result it fades out and becomes almost invisible untill you look at it. A UI effect much like this:
Unfortunately i’ve hit a wall, in my quest to develop such an AddOn, Due to restrictions set in place to avoid cheating, the LUA interpreter does not support realtime data streams. Which prevents the hardware to communicate with the AddOn Lua Scripts. There is no “legal” way around this.
So I kindly request that Blizzard Allow for an Integrated Library of GazePoint with the Tobii 4C Eye Tracker. It would allow for a great deal of creative UI, that would help accessibility to the game, and help Players keep their UI less cluttered, and adaptive without a ton of interactive buttons to turn things on and off, which is ultimately not that usefull either. I’m sure Tobii AB would be happy to help out with some collaboration, as WoW is a large potential market.
To the Community: Please let me know if there is any comments on this regarding gameplay or usecases i’ve not mentioned, i’ve only just returned to the game after a few years break to focus on my studies.
That’s actually pretty cool and I hope your request gets accepted
Question : Do you think if the eye tracker was implemented it can make certain UI elements " Dynamic " as in they follow your gaze to stay within your line of sight? say for example important tracker weakauras or bossmod anouncements ?
Yes that wouldn’t be hard, once you have the gaze point you can just change the position of the splash screen to be offset by x,y ammount or just on point. Not sure it wouldn’t be annoying in the long run, but deffinitely possible.
That sounds cool, but I don’t see Blizzard integrating it just for an addon.
Is there an addon that does it with mouse cursor? If not you could settle for that in the meantime.
I would specifically like the quest log on the right hand side of the screen faded to say .4 opacity until I mouse over it. I like being able to glace and see my objective but it does get in the way most of the time.
I think i’ve seen that too, however years ago. Regardless I will just comment on the mouse solution not because its a defence, but because i find the Eye-Tracking to fit other needs than the existing mouse version:
Your mouse is used for all combat so having this dynamic while in combat will leave you with an in combat fade/hide, being the only option, and that will also not fully accomplish the multi-modal ideas of having DBM follow gaze point, or have certain action base fade when you dont need a flask or something that you don’t have bount to a key. So there are things you could do, if it was supported that you currently cannot do.
An integrated library is not hard to do, and could be done in less than a weeks work. Even if its just a C or C++ or C# layer within World of Warcrafts programming, it should be easy to make a simple gazePoint getter accessible from lua by modifying the intepreter. There are multiple ways to get it done.
I want to be able to move around WoW just by looking at different part of the screen, and have certain facial expressions trigger defined macro actions. I’m able bodied, but using a mouse and keyboard is a lot of work.
Ough the facial expressions are going to be hard with a Tobii 4c, it tracks head and eyes, but doesnt collect any facial expressions im afraid, for that you would need some Image Processing AddOn with access to web camera data.
As for the moving around that also seems difficult to do with addon, but if it is integrated into WoW that is no problem. However you might be able to do some eye to cursor tracking outside of the game that will let you move with eye gaze through click to move, in some sort of work around.
I like the idea of seeing this in games, but WoW really isn’t an innovative game on the hardware side. Everyone has very similar hardware, or some variation thereof, a mouse a keyboard and a monitor. Blizz aren’t going to go writing some new library to enable some people with a specific type of hardware that would give those people an advantage - and if it’s not advantageous what is the point?
I find the idea fascinating and I think it’s something we’ll see in a lot of games in the future and it’s certainly an interesting discussion, but it’s not something you’re ever going to see in WoW in its current incarnation.
They dont really need a library as much as an API. There are well developed C, C++ and C# versions available, and I would be able whip up something rather fast. So its not like it will cost a lot of money, and even then there is Tobii AB who is a stakeholder, and i do see them taking some of the workload. But you are right its not likely blizzard will just do it. But I will have to agree that WoW isn’t bringing new stuff to the table in terms of hardware, though its mostly on the graphics side they add new hardware support and techonologies. Let me give you an example for the unity gazepoint API made by Tobii:
using System.Net.Sockets;
using System.Text;
using UnityEngine;
using Tobii.Gaming;
public class TobiiToWarcraftServer : MonoBehaviour
{
public static TobiiToWarcraftServer singleton;
GazePoint gazePoint;
// Start is called before the first frame update
void Start()
{
singleton = this;
}
// Update is called once per frame
void Update()
{
gazePoint = TobiiAPI.GetGazePoint();
DoSomethingWithGazePoint(udpClient, gazePoint.Viewport.x, gazePoint.Viewport.y, gazePoint.Timestamp);
}
}
It’s not so much the ease of it that’s the issue. It’s the question of balance. Until the technology become ubiquitous introducing this in a live game like WoW would be a nightmare for Blizz.
its actually super affordable and is allready integrated in quite a few games.
Just finished a study on multi-modal aiming, combining eye tracking reticle positioning with look rotation by mouse, so i have about 4 months experience + scientiffic insight into the area. And while Tobii 4c might be the best current tracker on the market its not the only one, and not by Tobii alone either.
Though the price tag for the 4c is about 200€. So in a sense its cheaper than some other input devices wow players spend money on.
I suppose this technology can also be used for accessibility purposes, right? I imagine this could help people with disabilities so maybe using that argument could convince Blizzard to introduce native support for that. It will be the same as native controller support, it will be added in Shadowlands and everyone will be able to use it but the main reason for Blizzard to implement it is accessibility. The fact that people that are perfectible capable to play with keyboard and mouse will be able to also play with controller it is just a fortunate consequence of Blizzard given more accessibility options.
Yes absolutely, i also mentioned it though its not that clear:
And i can also say quite firmly based on statistical anlysis that adding eye tracking wont outperform any existing technology, but it could be significantly worse though, depending on the implementation.
There’s a lovely woman living with SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy) who has been playing WoW for years and both blogging and vlogging about accessibility options. She’s still active and I think you might be able to gain some additional insight on this idea if you get in touch with her.
http ://www.abilitypowered.com/
If this addon could come to fruition in some form it would help many people who are physically unable to play WoW as of right now.
Maybe Blizzard would be more open to enabling a trial run on the classic client since fairness is far less of a concern there due to the inherently unbalanced nature of the game?
