Assassin's Creed Rogue gets Tobii eye-tracking tech

Assassin's Creed Rogue is to become the flagship title for SteelSeries' Sentry eye-tracking hardware, with every buyer getting a free copy of the game thanks to a partnership with publisher Ubisoft.

Announced back in June last year, the SteelSeries Sentry was originally targeted at the competitive gaming market with claims from the company that 'fixations per minute' was a valid means of tracking a player's efficacy in a given game. Accordingly, the bar-like device tracked the player's eye position and mapped said position to areas of the display - allowing for analysis of everything from which areas are the most frequently viewed to how quickly the player moves their vision from object to object on-screen.

Now, a partnership between Ubisoft and technology creator Tobii Tech means that the upcoming Assassin's Creed Rogue will gain support for the Sentry - but not for tracking 'fixations per minute.' 'Eye tracking is such a natural way to interact with a game and creates tons of potential opportunities for gameplay immersion,' claimed Ubisoft's Corneliu Vasiliu of the partnership. 'We are one of the first to integrate this technology in a video game, and the first to implement eye tracking as a gameplay input in a game of that scale - providing Assassin’s Creed Rogue gamers with an entirely new, complementary input to the keyboard and mouse.'

The system will work by adjusting the displayed image by tracking the user's gaze: glance to the left and the display will pan left, glance to the right and it will pan right, and so forth. Based on Tobii's 'Infinite Screen' technology, the integration works alongside keyboard and mouse control and is claimed to offer deeper immersion. 'Assassin’s Creed Rogue with eye tracking aligns the gamer’s and a character’s senses so naturally, creating a truly immersive gaming experience,' boasted Tobii's president Oscar Werner of the deal. 'We’ve added an intuitive and natural modality without inhibiting the player’s ability, taking anything away or having to make a trade-off that lessens Assassin’s Creed Rogue’s enjoyment for the gamer.

'This is only the beginning of eye-tracking in gaming. It is an important step in Tobii’s long term vision to create a strong ecosystem of games and apps that use eye tracking to create even more immersive experiences,' Werner added, without naming any further partnerships in the pipeline.

The free copy of Assassin's Creed Rogue will be available to the first 5,000 people buying the device between now and the game's launch in March. Those who miss out on the offer, or who already own a SteelSeries Sentry, will have to pay full price for the game in order to try out the experience for themselves. A video, reproduced below, demonstrates the technology.