Ubisoft has announced that PC gamers will have a unique and potentially groundbreaking way to play the upcoming Assassin's Creed: Rogue: With so-called "infinite screen" eye tracking technology that links the player's view directly to that of Shay Patrick Cormac's.
The system works with the SteelSeries Sentry, an eye-tracking device announced last summer. The mouse and keyboard inputs work as they usually do, but when the player looks to one side of the screen or the other, the character does as well, and the camera will pan in the same direction to create what Ubisoft calls an "Infinite Screen experience." It also pauses and resumes the game automatically when the player looks away from, and then back to, the screen.
"Eye tracking is such a natural way to interact with a game and creates tons of potential opportunities for gameplay immersion," Ubisoft Kiev Producer Corneliu Vasiliu said in a statement. "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."
It's not entirely new. The ARMA series and other sims have used head-tracking technology in similar ways, using peripherals like TrackIR. At $200, the SteelSeries Sentry isn't cheap, but as of today, anyone who purchases one (up to the first 5000 customers) will also get a free copy of the full version of Assassin's Creed: Rogue when it comes out. It's currently scheduled for release in March.
