Hands-on with Fove’s First Eye-tracking HMD Prototype
[Philip Lelyveld note: at the recent ETC Digital Town Square on Virtual Reality, I asked if there were any tools on the market to track eye motion in VR so artists could learn how to guide attention. This is a prototype of a potential solution.]
At Engadget Expand I met with Fove’s CEO, Yuka Kojima, who showed me the company’s first prototype head mounted display. Right now it consists of a lightweight foam housing, two lenses, and two small cameras, on the left and right of the lenses, pointed at each eye. I wasn’t allowed to snap a photo of the inside of the headset, but it appears they’re using all off-the-shelf components in this prototype. The lens and micro display assembly appeared to be torn out of a Sony HMZ headset. The infrared cameras on the left and right had fairly wide angle lenses and are probably taken out of a consumer gesture camera.
The next demo was closer to the applications that eye-tracking would be most useful for—gaze-based focus and character interaction. In the next scene I was standing in front of a virtual character in an open field. When I glanced at the background, the foreground blurred. When I glanced at the character, she smiled and came into focus while the background blurred.
The same mechanics could be used for foveated rendering, where the image is only rendered in high fidelity at the very center of the eye, while areas further away from that point are rendered with lower quality to reduce the computing power needed to render the scene (as we only see sharply in a very small area). This may be necessary to push framerates in virtual reality to 90 FPS or more, which is what Oculus believes is necessary.
All in all, Fove’s tech works well as a proof of concept.
See the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/hands-fove-eye-tracking-hmd-kickstarter-coming-march/