Eye tracking tech offers a closer look at Overwatch's UI in action

Competitive games survive on their ability rapidly communicate a large amount of information to players in the heat of battle. A video picked up by Kotaku offers a look at this kind of design in action by tracking a players pupil moment during a match of Overwatch.

Researcher Jon Matthis recorded himself playing a quick match of Blizzard’s multiplayer hero shooter while wearing a binocular mobile eye tracker from Pupil Labs. The result can be found above and uses a red indicator to show how his gaze jumps from the HUD, environment, and different characters as the match progresses.

"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)," explained Matthis in his Reddit post.

"That means that a huge part of the human strategy for surviving in the world revolves around our ability to quickly and accurately [direct] our fovea to the parts of the world that contain the information that we need to complete a given task."

Overwatch’s “compact and centered” UI has been highlighted as an excellent example of UI design in the past, and Matthis’ video is a quick look at that design in action. In his original Reddit thread, Matthis noted that he uses the technology for his research on human sensorimotor control and that this video was just for fun, but did say he’d consider doing more videos like it in the future.