‘FOVE’, The World’s First Eye-Tracking VR Headset Comes to Kickstarter Today – Road to VR

‘FOVE’, The World’s First Eye-Tracking VR Headset Comes to Kickstarter Today – Road to VR

FOVE is a Japanese technology company who are endeavoring to tackle an issue that will likely become a focus for the VR industry sooner than you think, eye-tracking in virtual reality. The company’s new headset employs gaze-detection for input, and today they launch their first Kickstarter campaign in order to get the hardware out into the community. We’ve…

Epic Games to Award $100 Million to Devs with New ‘MegaGrants’

Epic Games to Award $100 Million to Devs with New ‘MegaGrants’

Epic Games today announced at GDC that the company is set to turbo-charge their long-running developer grant initiative with ‘MegaGrants’ and the largest pool of funds yet, $100,000,000. Epic have been running developer-focused funding initiatives for many years now, with the original ‘Unreal Dev Grants’ fund announced back in 2015. Since then, VR developers have…

Full Reveal of ‘Star Wars Vader Immortal’ Quest Launch Title Coming Next Month – Road to VR

Full Reveal of ‘Star Wars Vader Immortal’ Quest Launch Title Coming Next Month – Road to VR

ILMxLab is to finally demo its upcoming Star Wars Virtual Reality series, Vader Immortal at the annual Star Wars Celebration event in April. We reported on ILMxLAB’s latest immersive VR experience way back in October last year, after the studio revealed that their forthcoming built-for-VR experience, set in the Star Wars universe, would form part…

This Startup Aims to Deliver a VR Headset with ‘Human Eye Level’ Resolution – Road to VR

This Startup Aims to Deliver a VR Headset with ‘Human Eye Level’ Resolution – Road to VR

Varjo Technologies, a Helsinki-based startup now out of stealth, recently demonstrated what it calls the world’s first human eye-resolution headmounted display. Intended for its own swath of Varjo-branded headsets, the new display configuration promises “unprecedented resolution of VR and AR content limited only by the perception of the human eye itself.” According to a hands-on by Tech Crunch,…

Deepening Social Presence with SMI Eye Tracking – Road to VR

Deepening Social Presence with SMI Eye Tracking – Road to VR

Christian-VillwockAt GDC this year, SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) showed a couple of new eye tracking demos at Valve’s booth. They added eye tracking to avatars in the social VR experiences of Pluto VR and Rec Room, which provided an amazing boost to the social presence within these experience.

There are so many subtle body language cues that are communicated non-verbally through the someone else’s eye contact, gaze position, or even blinking. Since it’s difficult to see your own eye movement due to saccades, it’s best to experience eye tracking in a social VR context. Without having a recording of your eyes in social VR, you have to rely upon looking at a virtual mirror as you look to the extremes of your periphery, observing your vestibulo–ocular reflex as your eyes lock gaze while you turn your head, or winking at yourself.

eye-tracking

I had a chance to catch up with SMI’s Head of the OEM business Christian Villwock at GDC to talk about the social presence multiplier of eye tracking, the anatomy of the eye, and some of the 2x performance boosts they’re seeing with foveated rendering on NVIDIA GPUs.

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Valve and SMI are Working to Add Eye-Tracking Support to OpenVR – Road to VR

Valve and SMI are Working to Add Eye-Tracking Support to OpenVR – Road to VR

Eye tracking experts SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) have collaborated with Valve to bring their technology to OpenVR. Eye tracking-enabled HTC Vive units are being shown at GDC 2017, as part of an R&D effort to integrate eye-tracking support into Valve’s OpenVR API. At this week’s Game Developers Conference, along with LG’s ‘next generation’ VR headset prototype,…