Swedish eye tracking technology company Tobii presented HTC Vive with fully integrated eye tracking sensor at GDC2017.
It is understood that Tobii's integrated eye tracking technology, which is being displayed this time, uses its proprietary EyeChip, which is mounted behind the Vive lens to track the user's eyes. The EyeChip is a dedicated ASIC that can handle sensor data itself to reduce the CPU load on the PC host and reduce peripheral power consumption. Currently EyeChip has been used in the Tobii Eye Tracker 4C (Tobii's latest generation of products).
On the application side, Tobii provided several demos to demonstrate how VR heads with integrated eye tracking technology can improve the user experience. After the first demonstration, I feel the most obvious advantage is that it can focus naturally, allowing users to aim, pick and throw virtual objects and other operations through the fixation.
In addition, eye contact is a basic social element. You can express a lot of different emotions through your eyes. If VR is integrated with eye tracking technology, it will undoubtedly have a positive effect on VR social networking or realistic interaction with NPC. .
The demo provided by Tobii allowed me to see a virtual avatar using eye tracking. During the demonstration, my eye movements (including the direction of the gaze and blinking), the system can accurately capture and present to my virtual avatar with almost no delay. For another interactive demonstration with the NPC, if I look at a pair of robots, the robot will shift their attention and attention to me. When I look at one of the robots, the two robots have different interactions. One robot will give me money, and the other will sell me various virtual items that can be thrown, such as rubber ducks, beach balls and sand buckets.
Tobii revealed that the integrated eye tracking solution at GDC 2017 aims to attract developers' attention and brainstorm. Although Tobii and its partners have successfully integrated eye tracking into HTC Vive, it is still a long way to go to break the limitations of current technology to bring the best user experience. Tobii plans to introduce eye-tracking sensor EyeChip into the next generation of mainstream VR headsets.