Eye gaze and head gaze in collaborative games

We present an investigation of sharing the focus of visual attention between two players in a collaborative game, so that where one player was looking was visible to the other. The difference between using head-gaze and eye-gaze to estimate the point of regard was studied, the motive being that recording head-gaze is easier and cheaper than eye-gaze. Two experiments are reported, the first investigates the effect of a high immersion presentation of the game in VR Head Mounted Display compared with a lower immersion desktop presentation. The second examines the high immersion condition in more detail. The studies show that in spite of there being many factors that could affect the outcome of a relatively short period of game play, sharing eye-gaze in the high immersion condition produces shorter overall durations and better subjective ratings of team work than does sharing head-gaze. This difference is not apparent in the low immersion condition. The findings are a good argument for exploiting the opportunities for including and using eye tracking within head mounted displays in the context of collaborative games.