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Virtual reality and eye tracking seem to be an incredible match – for the reasons I will illustrate below – and now the first dedicated stab at HTC's eye-tracking helmet has arrived in the US and Canada for $ 1,599. That's what HTC's official blog says, following a previous headphone release in China and Europe last month.
Why follow the eye? As my colleague Nick explained when he tried the Vive Pro Eye in January, it not only allows you to control things in virtual reality by watching them, but also to produce more realistic VR images with less processing power – by rendering only parts of a scene that you observe in high resolution, instead of wasting those resources in peripheral vision. This is a technique called rendered fové.
This is important because it takes more processing power for rendering virtual reality scenes than for today's flat-panel 3D applications and games, leaving many less compelling virtual reality experiences that they would not be otherwise. Eye tracking can also theoretically give you a much more convincing avatar in a virtual world when you interact with other people because it can show them where you actually look, even if you have a headset on your face:
HTC says it has plugins for Unity and a wrapper that works with Nvidia to make it easier to integrate sophisticated rendering, but these benefits will not be completely free; most rely on developers to integrate them into applications and games, and there is not enough reason to do so if headphones do not exist in the real world.
HTC probably will not change that with the relatively expensive Vive Pro Eye for businesses. But this could be a pretty important start for optimistic developers.
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