Fove had a demo and a presentation at the Exploring Future Reality workshop where they showed their eyetracking technology. This is based upon six IR emitters and two sensors and is integrated into their own VR headset. One drawback – you can’t wear your glasses so the images I saw were all a bit out of focus.
After focusing on some white spots to do a quick calibration, I was looking at some CG content in the headset. In one sequence, the eyetracking detects not only where you are looking but also your gaze angle. It then does foveated rendering on the image. In other words, if I focus on a near object, that will be in sharp focus and full resolution with the background a bit blurry and lower resolution. The opposite happens if I focus on the background or objects that are further away. This worked moderately well and seemed to flash back and forth in some scenes. This may have been an artifact of my sciatic eye movement (rapid movements) that were confusing the eye tracker.
The foveated rendering feature is important as this can save 40-60% of the GPU power as the rendering requirements drop dramatically.
The next sequence was a first person shooter demo with firing directed by simply looking at objects. This worked extremely well as I was able to rapidly acquire and destroy targets.
Fove is now offering an SDK of the eye tracking and plans to offer their own headset in 2017.
