FOVE:The World's First Eye Tracking Virtual Reality Headset

shadragon · May 20, 2015

FOVE:The World's First Eye Tracking Virtual Reality Headset is on Kickstarter. Not a great selection of pledge level rewards, but I did sign up for one. The eye tracking looks interesting and could work nicely for targeting in E: D.

Link here: http://kck.st/1Acy1T6

Andovar · May 20, 2015

This is intriguing.
Although I just dumped quite a bit of change into my DK2 setup, so I think i'll just keep an eye on the fove for now.

I find this really interesting (albeit a little hard to believe):

shadragon · May 20, 2015

The resolution was quite good as well at 2560 x 1440, but it does not say if that is both eye pieces together or what.

Zenith · May 20, 2015

It also suffers the usual problem of people who wear glasses. Thing is this senses your eye position and focus, so theoretically it could take into account your long/short sight and correct against it in the visuals.

LoneTech · May 21, 2015

Sorry, it does not sense your focus (accomodation). It tracks your gaze, i.e. direction of each eye, and thereby the convergence point. It could also measure pupil size, but that relates more to brightness or interest than focus. I find the use of convergence to do artificial out of focus blurring to be an undesired gimmick, much like most blur effects; true accomodation effects will wait for lightfield headsets, as were demonstrated at an unacceptable resolution by nvidia. I think some responsible for that now work for Oculus. The foveated rendering on the other hand makes a lot of sense for cases where the graphics card can't keep up with rendering in full resolution (this is what they meant by not needing a high powered rig). Sadly I don't think the raw resolution of the FOVE is enough to make it lossless, even though it is somewhat higher than the Rift, and the same techniques would help any of these lens distorted VR displays for simple geometric reasons (rectilinear projection produces too many pixels towards the edges for the angular resolution available). https://xkcd.com/1080/ gives a rough overview of the acuity of the human eye; the gaze tracking in a FOVE allows to use this to allocate rendering power where it matters.

I did choose to back the FOVE. Perhaps I will learn to use contact lenses.

Beavis Tingleball · May 21, 2015

capital M E H....i saw it...dont like the idea of aiming with your eyes... just kinda stupid and very unrealistic. actual subtle movements translate into more dramatic movements??? nah..they should leave it at pos tracking.. just my 2 cents.

shadragon · May 21, 2015

Looks like they will make their goal easily. 44 Days to go and only $25K.

I'm also going to be trying to get a Dev version of the HTC / VALVe Vive.

djbordie · May 21, 2015

diddo, however im getting no response back from valve...you?

Cube · May 28, 2015

Beavis Tingleball said:
capital M E H....i saw it...dont like the idea of aiming with your eyes... just kinda stupid and very unrealistic. actual subtle movements translate into more dramatic movements??? nah..they should leave it at pos tracking.. just my 2 cents.

The real beauty of eyetracking is in the foveated rendering, not so much in aiming with your eyes. the human eyes can see combined about 200 degrees horizontally, but the actual part of that arc we see in any sort of real detail is surprisingly small and outside of that it mostly gets filled in by your brain so if the computer can tell where you're specifically looking it can focus the fancy schmancy rendering bells and whistles in that area and not have to do it for the rest of the image, saving a load of overhead that translates into lots of lovely FPS. Eyetracking and foveated rendering is going to be extremely important to the future of VR to the point i'm amazed it's not really been a priority until now.

As for the fove kickstarter, i'm not saying it's certain but i'm giving low odds on them getting bought by oculus or htc before their kickstarter ends.

ranix · May 28, 2015

I don't think this project needs my Kickstarter money to succeed.

Thoemse · May 28, 2015

shadragon said:
The resolution was quite good as well at 2560 x 1440, but it does not say if that is both eye pieces together or what.

It is a 2560x1440 screen working like in the DK2. It's 1280x1440 each.

Jake_blakeson · May 28, 2015

if they can keep the framerates up this could solve some of the issues with VR and motion sickness. I read that one of the big problems with VR is ppl don't just move their heads when they look at stuff they quickly move their eyes to what they want to see then move their heads. Because of this, there is a lot of neck strain and blurred motion associated with VR headsets that only track users heads.
I feel the more companies creating VR Headsets the better. Hopefully this means that if any of the big players drop their VR headset products or raise the price on their gear so it's not within reach of the general public VR will not die with it like it did in the 90's.

X-Terminator · Jun 11, 2015

I'd like it as to replace head-tracking but not to aim my weapons with as in Star Citizen (that game will be so short lived).
FD should seriously consider implementing it and allow for any GUI colour changes/transparencies.

stevesideas · Jun 13, 2015

For me the eye tracking is a bit gimmicky. I am quite happy with the way the DK2 currently works. If though for instance it reduced or alleviated the issue with motion sickness then it might be worth buying in to.

Tepescovir · Jun 13, 2015

eye tracking has been used for a while now, but more for medical reasons etc. so the tech is already there, just need to see how well it could be integrated into vr.

Mabey not as a replacment for aiming, but an assistance, also, the menus in ED would be so much better if you could use them by eye movement

surf · Jun 14, 2015

I had a go with a Fove a couple of months ago.. the eye tracking was absolutely amazing. I was stunned at how accurate it was. I'll definitely be getting one.

Cheers

Zephyriel · Jun 14, 2015

Eye tracking is a very nice feature to have, not just for aiming. Imagine in-game graphics taking into account the accomodation, when you'll be looking at your hands, the background will blur, and vice versa, like it does in real life.
In horror games it could be used to surprise you.
It could also make info pop up when you look at certain objects without necessarily moving your head to center the object.
There are many possibilities. I'm sure that if VR becomes widely adopted, eye tracking will eventually become the norm.