Tobii Eye Tracker’s accuracy frightens me

I’ve had a Tobii Eye Tracker sitting among a pile of PC peripherals that I want to cover or give away for a year now. I hate when this happens, but time and sanity is limited. But something came over me this week, and I finally did the work to plug in the eye-tracking device and set it up … and now I’m scared.

The Tobii Eye Tracker 4C is a $150 USB bar-shaped device that sits beneath your monitor. Using an array of cameras and infrared lights, it can tell precisely where you’re looking on your screen. Tobii is positioning it as a gaming peripheral, and the company is working with publishers like Ubisoft and some indie developers to integrate eye tracking into their games. In Kingdom Come: Deliverance, you can control the camera a bit with your eyes similar to the TrackIR head-tracking camera. And you can set onscreen UI elements to fade to almost total transparency unless you’re looking at them — when you do, they will immediately pop back to 100 percent opacity.