Vive Pro Eye’s eye-tracking technology already employs foveated rendering to provide visually richer VR experiences. But now one company claims it can push those results even further without any additional hardware.
Digital imaging company Almalence just announced the Digital Lens for Vive Pro Eye. It’s a Unity plug-in that accesses the headset’s eye-tracking data. Almalence says it takes this data and “increases the visible resolution and removes chromatic aberrations across the entire field of view”.
Chromatic aberration is a term that refers to distorted images caused by wavelengths of colour not reaching the same focal plane. It can lead to blurry images with colored edges.
Here’s an image the company itself provided of the Digital Lens’ effects. Note that we haven’t seen the Lens at work for ourselves; we can’t verify if the effect is really as strong as this image suggests.
And here’s another found on their website. Again, this is all materials Almalence itself provides.
The plug-in is available now for free to Vive Pro Eye users upon request as part of a testing phase. Potential commercial contracts will be discussed on a case-by-case basis.
Given its dependence on eye-tracking, it won’t make any difference to other VR headsets out there. Almalence also says the plug-in adds less than a millisecond of latency to VR.
Of course, Vive Pro Eye is an enterprise-level headset, so it won’t mean much for VR fans at home. But we’ll definitely be interested to see if developers and companies using the plug-in discover a big improvement or not.
