Checking Overwatch’s UI with an Eye Tracker

While playing competitive multiplayer games we have to keep an eye on so many things — health bar, number of bullets left, enemies approaching, etc. So, our eyes are moving all over screen. Jon Matthis has decided to prove this point with an eye tracker. Jon set up the tracker and decided to play Overwatch to watch where his eyes go. 

Here’s how your eyes would probably react to some Roadhog action:

He also gave some thoughts on Reddit:

Hello! So, I played a bit of Overwatch while wearing a Pupil Labs binocular mobile eye tracker!

Humans are very visual animals, but we only really get high quality visual information from a fairly small area of our retina (called the “fovea, roughly the width of your thumb at arm’s length). This area takes up roughly 1% of your visual field, but roughly 50% of your visual cortex is devoted to processing information from this area. That means that a huge part of the human strategy for surviving in the world revolves around our ability to quickly and accurately directing our fovea to the parts of the world that contain the information that we need to complete a given task.

Because eye movements are so central to our neural strategy, eye trackers are a very powerful tool for the study of human sensorimotor control – Basically, eye movements are a physical measurement that provides direct insight into your cognitive processes!

Jon Matthis 

The eyes’ directions here are quite logical. You look at your health bar after an intense fight and focus on scanning your surroundings while nobody is near. The video also proves that Blizzard did a great job at building clear and economical interface. Everything is exactly where it should be.

Author: Artyom Sergeev