The bulk of today's press release announcing a March 10 release for the PC port of Assassin's Creed Rogue is strictly boilerplate. Then you get to the last paragraph and read that "the Assassin’s Creed Rogue PC development team in Kiev has partnered with Tobii Tech to integrate eye tracking input as a component of gameplay." Wait, what?

Thankfully, the folks at Tobii go into much more detail in their own press release, describing what they're calling an "infinite screen" experience in Rogue. When a player looks to the left side of the screen, for instance, an eye tracker can measure that gaze at 50 frames per second and report it back to the game. That causes the in-game protagonist to look to his left and the camera to automatically pan to show what he's looking at.

You can still use traditional mouselook at the same time, but the idea seems to be that you won't want to once you've experienced what Tobii calls "the next evolution of human interfaces in gaming." A short video from the developers demonstrates how the technology will work, showing the game reacting as the player's "gaze point" moves across the screen. "The screen automatically centers around whatever you're looking at, which in essence provides you with this infinite screen where your point of gaze will always control what's being shown on the screen," Tobii Tech Software Partners VP Anders Olsson says in the video.

As if that's not enough, eye tracking users will find the game pauses automatically when they look away from the screen and resumes when they look back. Sounds perfect for gamers who find it too onerous to reach for the escape key every time they want to look up at a Big Bang Theory rerun on the nearby TV.

A $200 chicken-and-egg problem

You need special hardware to activate these features of course: specifically, the $200 Steelseries Sentry Eye Tracker, the first consumer device to integrate Tobii's technology. The Sentry, released late last year, is currently being marketed as a way for gaming streamers to virtually "point" viewers to on-screen elements while maintaining full control the game with the mouse and keyboard. It's also being sold as a tool for pro-level gamers who want to analyze and improve their performance by seeing which areas of the screen they're looking at, and for how long, during key moments.

Those niche uses are fine for what they are, but Tobii seems especially excited about the prospect of big budget, major studio releases increasingly using eye-tracking as a new control scheme. "There is a strong indirect business value for Tobii as every new application such as this AAA game integration will increase the usability of the company’s eye-tracking platforms, thereby driving the sales long term," the company says in its press release. To support that vision, the next 5,000 Steelseries Sentry units sold will include a bundled copy of Assassin's Creed Rogue for free.

But Tobii sees eye tracking as useful for much more than just camera control. The company suggests trackers can be used for "multidimensional movement," where a player shoots in one direction with the mouse and throws a grenade in another direction with their eyes, for instance. In-game characters could respond to eye contact "just as they would in real life," Tobii suggests, or parts of the game's environment can react when a player looks at them. Developers who want to pursue these kinds of ideas and get in on what's still pretty close to the ground floor can invest in a $139 EyeX dev kit to add support to their projects.

While having Rogue as a AAA proof of concept is useful, it might not be enough to convince gamers to buy an unproven, $200 eye controller on its own. Tobii's Eye Arcade web site lists four other indie games that currently support the eye tracker, including the Asteroid-shooting demo we tried out at CES 2013. That early prototype was a little janky at the time but showed how controlling a game with just a flick of the eyes can feel a lot like mind-control, if done properly.

We're looking forward to seeing how Tobii's finalized eye-tracking technology works in a major studio release when Rogue hits next month. Still, we have to wonder if Gear VR-style virtual reality or HoloLens-style augmented reality, more than flat monitors, represent the real future of controlling games with your eyes. Then again, these aren't mutually exclusive ideas; firms like SensoMotoric Instruments are researching how eye tracking can improve the virtual reality experience by improving focus and reducing motion sickness.

It's definitely something to keep an eye on. Eh? Eh? I'll show myself out.

Listing image by Flickr / Miran Rijavec