The Potential of Webcam Based Real Time Eye-Tracking to Reduce Rendering Cost

Performance optimisation continues to be a relevant topic both in hardware and software development, with video games producing fully rendered images every 16 or 34 ms, depending on the desired framerate. Human observers close their eyes for about 300 ms an average of twelve times per minute, which means many frames will never be observed. This paper aimed to examine if it would be possible to reduce rendering time by detecting and skipping these unobserved frames. Blinks were identified during runtime by detecting the eye aspect ratio of the observer in low-quality web camera footage. A prototype using this method was tested on a small group of subjects to determine if footage watched this way was perceived as distracting or of lesser quality than unaltered images. Results from a questionnaire suggest that the altered footage did not impact the subjects’ opinions, with no participant reporting any visual disturbances. Because this test used video footage, skipping frames was substituted by a lower resolution render. Altered frames were rendered an average of five percent faster than their unaltered counterparts.