De Montfort University reearchers are developing technology to allow people with severe motor disabilities to play 3D computer games using only their eyes.

Eye-gaze systems bounce infrared light from LEDs at the bottom of a computer monitor and track a person’s eye movements using stereo infrared cameras. The researchers added features to allow glancing momentarily off-screen in a particular direction to switch between different functions, or to call up transparent icons dragged onto game objects to perform a particular action.

A “gaze gesture” is also built in to temporarily turn off the eye-gaze functions altogether.