Watching Me, Watching You: How Eye Tracking Is Coming to VR and Beyond14 Mar 2022 17:22
TO new wave of VR headsets is expected this year: the PlayStation VR 2Meta’s pro-level VR headset called Project Cambria and maybe Apple’s long-rumored device. There’s one thing all of them will likely have in common: eye tracking.
The kind of consumer VR headsets you could buy for everyday use haven’t had eye tracking before. Yes, there are headsets that can use infrared cameras to track eye movement, but these have been more expensive, business-focused VR and AR headsets like the HTC Vive Pro Eyethe Pico Neo 2 Eye and the Microsoft HoloLens 2.
Eye tracking on a consumer device you can get in a store is a whole other step, and one that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.
I’ve used eye-tracking tech before and I know its benefits. You can more easily control things in VR by looking right at them instead of trying to use your hands, and it could be the gateway to better-looking VR graphics and smaller, smarter headsets. Eye tracking could also open up ways of having your VR avatar make more human-like eye contact with other avatars in future metaverse spaces.
But eye tracking also brings a ton of questions about data privacy and how big companies will manage that extra data responsibly.
There are no clear answers to these questions, but I spoke with Anand Srivatsa, CEO of Tobii, which is the largest manufacturer of eye-tracking components for VR, AR, PCs and assistive technologies. He sees eye tracking as the key steppingstone for where headsets and metaverses need to go next.
Some headsets already have eye tracking, like the business-focused Pico Neo 2 Eye. A ring around the lenses uses infrared cameras.
Foveated rendering could push more graphics and shrink future 5G headsets
Your eyes aren’t capable of seeing all the detail you think they’re taking in. The fovea at the center of the eye jumps around to look at moments in detail, while the rest of the world is perceived peripherally, as if in lower resolution. That same trick can be applied in eye-tracking VR using a technique called foveated rendering, bumping up the graphics processing in the small area your fovea is focused on, and making the rest lower-res. It saves processing power and works surprisingly well, and it’s exactly what the next wave of VR headsets will lean on to create higher-res graphics on small headsets with limited battery life.
“There is this physical limitation on how much compute and graphics you need to render a full field of view, which, of course, is wasteful – the user doesn’t actually need it to be rendered that way,” says Srivatsa. What’s interesting is that this could also lead to smaller headsets with smaller batteries and long-promised cloud-rendered streaming tech (similar to how we can already stream games to play on the fly) could work for VR over 5G.
https://chubimon.com/watching-me-watching-you-how-eye-tracking-is-coming-to-vr-and-beyond/
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