A Preliminary Test with HTC Vive Pro Eye

Recently, I had a chance to test the new released HTC Vive Pro Eye headset. The headset is the first VR headset integrated eye tracking, and it is hard to notice the hardware for eye tracking when compared with a regular HTC Vive Pro. Vive Pro integrated the eye-tracking technology from Tobii, which is a Swedish company specialized in eye control and eye tracking. Some of the high-end PCs have been using Tobii eye tracking for the control such as wake on gaze, light up LEDs, unlock computer with facial recognition.

Because we designed our VR scenes with various intensity levels, and visual flow intensity is actually a significant impact on maintaining balance. Gaze tracking would be a useful tool for us to get a better understanding of how the visual flow catches attention and how participants react to the variations of the visual intensities. Tobii’s Unity plug-in provides a lot of cool features in their visualization such as heatmap . Heatmap uses color code rendered on the target object surface to represent the duration of fixation time. Here is a demo video from Tobii showing that an avatar’s gaze tracking and interactions in front of a shelf full of products in a VR market scene. Fixation is determined by shooting the eye-tracking ray to the target surface. The longer duration time of the fixation will heat up the spot in red, less duration will make it green and then blue.