Harder video game to help in better pilots head-up displays

Here is a video game which may be used to design better dashboards and head-up displays for search-and-rescue helicopters. The fiendishly difficult video game, developed by Canadian researchers, tracks a player’s eyes to make enemies appear where a player is least likely to see them. The researchers designed the game to test ideas about how eye movements betray where our attention is focused. “We could make it harder if we presented important game-related items where we didn’t think people were paying attention,” says James Clark, a computer vision researcher at McGill University in Montreal.

This approach means players cannot learn to expect baddies in particular locations. They always appear in the area of the screen a gamer is least aware of. The New Scientist’s Kurt Kleiner writes that it is easy to track eye movements using small cameras that follow the movement of a person’s pupils, but Clark and colleague Li Jie knew that the place someone’s eyes are pointing at is not always the place they are most aware of. To learn how to predict where a person’s attention was focused, the pair tested subjects’ reactions to an image suddenly appearing on the computer screen under different circumstances. The experiments showed two things. First, when someone is looking at a fixed point in a complex part of a scene, they find it harder to divert their attention to a new object. Second, the researchers confirmed previous research suggesting that when looking at a moving object, people tend to focus their attention slightly ahead of it.

Those results were used to design a first-person shoot ‘em up game that could choose to make enemies appear in places where they would be either easy or hard to see. The game tracks a player’s eyes to work out areas they are paying most, and least, attention to. Gamers had to avoid missiles, fireballs, and other enemy objects, while trying to shoot an opponent. When enemies were placed away from a player’s area of focus, scores went down significantly. The research could be used to design harder video games, says Clark, especially if games eventually come packaged with eye tracking devices. Some games companies are already investigating using them as a way of controlling games. Even without eye-tracking, the work demonstrates a new way to think about designing games to control how players notice enemies and other features. Clark adds, thoug, that his main interest is in using the attention technique to make things easier, not harder. For example, head-up displays for helicopter rescue pilots that would put vital information in easy-to-see places and less important information where it would not be distracting, he says. “That’s a good one,” says Ronald Rensink, a vision researcher at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. “I’ve been talking about this as a possible approach. It’s good to see someone has made it happen. If you can predict attention, you can improve performance.”

A paper on the McGill research will appear in a future edition of ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications.