Eyetracking in Virtual Reality HMDs

Now that the Gear VR is available for you to experience, it is bound to raise VR awareness and also generate excitement around what’s ahead for us in the world of VR. There is going to be a lot of enthusiasms for upcoming head mounted gears such as HTC Vive, Sony’s Playstation VR and of course Facebook’s Oculus. These are the devices that have a lot of media coverage these days and have a fan following as well.

There is however another player in this emerging hardware market. FOVE was started as a kickstarter project and it was successful in raising half a million dollars from 1500 people. The fundamental difference between FOVE and the other hear manufacturers is around the control and experience systems. FOVE is expected to be world’s first virtual reality headset that will allow you to immerse yourself in worlds that react to your eyes and emotions, to experience precision control at the speed of thought. One major product differentiator is around the belief that using the eyetracking and control mechanisms will reduce a lot of unnatural head movements thereby reducing simulation sickness. FOVE promises eye tracking to an accuracy of 1/5 of a degree as well as ultra low latency head tracking. The new device is expected to provide a 100-degree view using a high-res 5.7 inch display. There has also been some ergonomic enhancements announced for the product. Instead of the elastic material used in the initial headset prototypes, FOVE has been upgraded with ratcheting, articulated clasps to enable the headset to adapt to any head form. The headset will come with Lighthouse integration. FOVE will implement Valve’s OpenVR and thus will support all OpenVR titles. The FOVE SDK is intended to seamlessly integrate content from Unity, Unreal Engine, and Cryengine allowing you to port your existing VR content into FOVE. The SDK is intended to allow the developer to add eye tracking to existing VR content as well as provides more graphics power with their native rendering. One aspect that also distinguishes their product offering is that in order to experience FOVE you will not need a $1000 PC. I have tried to understand how that is being made feasible but have had no luck yet. My initial assumption was that the PC would need massive GPU’s in order to render high quality graphics and support the algorithms behind the eye control and tracking.

Other Companies in the Eye Tracking Area

The concept of using eye tracking in computing applications is not new. There are other companies that have been in the space for years now. One of the players that was solely dedicated to this space was Tobii technologies, a Swedish company.

Tobii Tech’ new IS4 eye tracking module is powered by the EyeChip and is the most compact and cost-optimized eye tracking platform available.

IS4 is the company’s sixth generation eye-tracking platform, but it is the first to meet the requirements necessary for integration into consumer products, such as low power consumption and the ability to be placed in a variety of different devices and configurations.

The IS4 module uses near infrared sensors and illuminators as well as Tobii EyeCore algorithms and the company’s proprietary middleware engine.

Tobii is working with MSI on integrating eye-tracking into its gaming laptops. Starbreeze is using it for the StarVR VR HMD. Tobii has also had some success in integrating eye tracking Oculus DK2 in the past. There was also SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) that offered world’s first eye tracking upgrade package for the Oculus Rift DK2 virtual reality headset.

For VR based applications, this emerging trend may be new but it does show a lot of promise and there are quite a few companies that are dedicating resources in this area. For this momentum to continue forward, a lot will depend on how successful the product releases are for SONY, HTC and Oculus. At least for FOVE this will be important as the current CEO and co-founder, Yuka Kozima was at one time a former game developer for SONY.