Steelseries Sentry review – eyes on with Tobii’s Eye-X tech and Assassin’s Creed Rogue

STREAMING & TRAINING

The Sentry’s in-game implementation may not be quite as eye-opening as we first hoped, but it does have another feature that Tobii hopes will appeal to professional gamers as well as anyone who streams games on YouTube or Twitch. In games like StarCraft II and Dota II, for instance, it can add an overlay to your screen that records where you look throughout a match, allowing players and viewers alike to see which parts of the game are most important to you, what you pay the most attention to, and how your play style compares to others. The statistics and graphs help you work out how often you’re looking at important things like the minimap, your resources, and unit counts. We used the Sentry over the course of several weeks as a total Starcraft II novice, and saw a small improvement in our win rate purely through increasing our in-game awareness and watching our replays.

^ Eye tracking starts automatically as soon as you load up supported games, but you only get feedback when watching replays 

^ The tracking graph breaks down how often you look at specific parts of the screen, including the mini-map and resource panels

Currently only DOTA 2 and StarCraft 2 are officially supported by the Sentry software, so unless you’re streaming there’s no way to get visual feedback of where you’re looking in other games. Steelseries says more games are due to be added in the future, but there has been no indication as to what titles might make the cut. Because it relies heavily on having access to replays, it may be limited to RTS and MOBA games for the time being, but we’d be intrigued to see it applied to competitive first person shooters like Counter Strike.

The technology has already provided some fascinating insights into how professional players approach games across a whole host of genres. The fascinating video below shows how Japanese Street Fighter player Sako doesn’t actually look at his health or super meters, his character or even his opponent’s character for the majority of a match, but instead focuses on the space between the two fighters. 

It’s a niche feature, to be sure, limted to a few games and only for serious gamers that want to improve, but for the time being, it’s certainly where we see the Sentry gaining the most traction. Controlling games using eye tracking could be a godsend for players with disabilities, but for the majority it’s little more than a novelty. We’ve yet to see a game that really utilises it in an effective manner that’s free of flaws. We’d love to see it being incorporated into RPG cutscenes, for instance, so characters could tell and react to where we were looking, particularly if we weren’t paying any attention to them while they were midway through a huge speech, but we’ve yet to see any games put these kinds of interactions into effect.

WHERE NEXT?

There may be a glimmer of hope on the horizon, though, as Tobii has made its eye-tracking SDK available to buy for anyone who’d like to try their hand at it. Assassin’s Creed Rogue came to use the technology after the game’s producer saw it being demonstrated at CES earlier this year and bought the development kit almost straight away. Tobii president Oscar Werner even teased the possibility of the upcoming Star Citizen being a potential Sentry candidate when we spoke to him about the future of Tobii’s Eye-X tech, so we’ll be keen to see how developers decide to integrate the device in the future.

Tobii is also confident the technology will eventually be incorporated directly into gaming laptops and PC monitors, with consoles and other operating systems following shortly afterwards. They even have early wearable prototypes that have eye-trackers sitting on top of a pair of glasses which they’re working to make into head-mounted displays.

For now, though, we feel the Steelseries Sentry is little more than an intriguing glimpse into the future, or a seriously niche training tool for streamers and hardcore gamers. This may well change if a new game comes along that absolutely nails the method of implementation, but right now it’s difficult to recommend it for anything other than its streaming features, especially when it’s so expensive. Needless to say, we’ll be keeping a close eye on how it progresses.