Tobii announced today that it is the supplier of the eye tracking technology for HTC’s new Vive Pro Eye VR headset. HTC announced the Vive Pro Eye durings its special press event yesterday.
The company highlighted use cases such as more authentic avatars in social VR and gaze based UIs. More importantly however, HTC states it enables foveated rendering.
Foveated rendering is a process which renders most of the view of a VR headset at lower resolution except for the exact area where the user’s eye is pointed, which is detected with eye tracking. That area in front of the eye — where humans perceive the greatest detail — is rendered at a significantly higher resolution. Foveated rendering is considered crucial for future advancement of VR as it allows for higher resolutions without impossible GPU requirements.
Tobii first announced it was working with a major VR company in late 2018. It’s now clear that company is HTC. Combined with the company’s partnership with NVIDIA, HTC now has access to the full stack of technologies it needed for foveated rendering.
The new Vive Pro Eye headset is being shown off at both companys’ booths at CES. We’ll be posting our detailed impressions later this week.
