Vive Pro Eye
Vive Pro Eye
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The use of eye-tracking within a virtual reality.
From the creator of the HTC Vive, the HTC company created an eye tracking system for user of one of the more known virtual reality headset.
What is the Vive Pro Eye?
What is the Vive Pro Eye?
The Vive Pro Eye is a headset created by HTC that is made to track the user's eye. It combines eye tracking technology from Tobii, a company focus on eye tracking, and HTC's Vive headset so that the use's eye can be tracked even with the headset on without needing a significant amount of bulk added to the headset.
How it works is that the headset creates a pattern of infrared light, that gets laid out over the user's eye and it reads the reflected pattern back to determine the eye's position. Since the light are infrared, they won't be visible to the average human. To add on, since light are coming from the edge, they will also reflect back onto the ring as well without disrupting the field of view.
The rings around the focal lens are actually infrared emitters and sensors! Image from The Verge.
Why is eye tracking cool?
Why is eye tracking cool?
There are numerous benefits for eye tracking. These reason can include a more immersive social interactions and numerous of other ways to interact with the virtual world.
Eye tracking makes characters feels more alive when multiple users are viewing one another avatars. The eyes won't be staring dead ahead and will instead look and blink along with its controller.
A video demoing the eye tracking on the user's avatar. Notice that the character can also blink.
Why is this useful?
Why is this useful?
Another method of control
Another method of control
Eye tracking offers user another way to interact with the environment in VR. This is especially useful for those that can't quite use the wands and controllers that most VR has. Frooxius, a YouTube content creator, demoed the various uses of VR, including scaling object, selecting object, and showing the data that it collects. In Frooxius video, he also shows that the Vive Pro Eye is capable of getting the user's pupil size.
Foveated Display Resolution
Foveated Display Resolution
Some of the data that that is use from the eye tracker can also be use to increase the performance and frame rate of the VR headset with the use of Foveated Display Resolution. How this work is that the resolution is set higher towards the user's point of focus, while their periphery is set to a lower resolution.
The TV screen above a journalist from Engadget, shows the foveated display sensor.
What are some of the issues?
What are some of the issues?
My biggest concern about the Vive Pro Eye is potential latency issues and positioning issue. All these features measures a very small area, so there's little room for errors. Luckily latency doesn't seem to be noticeable by various reviewers and the eye tracking can actually help put the headset on in an optimal position.
All of this, however, comes with a hefty price tag of 1599$, however, a recent update says we will soon be able to add eye tracking to our current headset for just 159$, but it is not confirm if it will be applicable to all headsets on the market.
All in all, the Vive Pro Eye see
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