Visual analysis of eye gazes to assist strategic planning in computer games

Abstract

This work studies the use of a conventional eye tracking system for analysis of an online game player's thinking processes. For this purpose, the eye gaze data of several users playing a simple online turn-based checkers game were recorded and made available in real-time to gaze-informed players. The motivation behind this work is to determine if making the eye-gaze data available can help these players to predict the gaze-tracked opponent player's further moves, and also how this can be most effectively done. We also tested different orientations of the screen on which the gaze data were displayed. By our visual and algorithmic analysis we validated (1) that prediction is possible and (2) that accuracy highly depends on the moves of players throughout the game as well as on the screen orientation. We believe that our study has implications on visual problem solving in general, especially in collaborative scenarios.