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Tobii's Eye Tracker 5 brings enhanced immersion to PC gaming

This eye tracking software brings you into your games without the need of a headset.

Chase Evans Former Producer
Chase was the resident keyboard guru and a big-time virtual reality gamer -- you've likely met him in VR before and never even realized it! Prior to working for CNET, Chase worked at Electronic Arts as a video editor for nearly a decade, helping to create game trailers for numerous franchises from Battlefield to EA Sports.
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Chase Evans
2 min read

Intuitive controls can make or break most games, especially on a PC, where you may need to learn a fairly complex mouse and keyboard control system. The Tobii Eye Tracker 5 hopes to make PC games easier to control by using your head and eye movements to correlate with your character. 

The $229 device is on the more expensive side, but it takes advantage of increasing eye tracking support in PC games, like in Star Citizen, where you get to naturally look around to check your ship's surroundings. The immersion boost was massive for me, making both fighting with pirates and narrowly avoiding asteroids way smoother -- though to be fair, crashing into asteroids in that game is still quite prevalent for me.

Adventure games like Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and Shadow of the Tomb Raider also fully support the device, letting your head control the in-game camera while your eyes can help aim weapons instead of you having to use your mouse cursor. 

Even popular online game League of Legends makes use of the eye tracker in combination with Mobalytics software to track competitive players' bad habits in the game, creating patterns of data that can be used for improvement. The tracking software even lets you know during a replay of a match what you were looking at onscreen at any given moment, letting you discover where exactly you might've missed an important cue.

The Tobii isn't the only head tracking hardware out there for PC gaming. DIY options exist to get a similar effect, but they require wearing a physical item on your head in combination with certain webcams that can see infrared. Meanwhile the Tobii also works with players who wear glasses, and it's also useful in the dark.