Oculus have purchased the eye tracking company, The Eye Tribe in what looks like a move to strengthen their eye tracking system for the Oculus Rift
The Eye Tribe have been around working on eye tracking since 2007, and raised $3 million during their startup. They received a $2.3 million grant from the Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation.
Eye tracking in VR has been called for, for a while now, and last year in March Fove VR raised $11 million to develop its foveated rendering technology. The Eye Tribe are specialists in this area. Eye tracking is desired so that players can easily navigate a game world without having to stress themselves out with looking around using the controller. Eye tracking would relieve them from this, leaving them open to more important tasks at hand. In fact, Kojima said,
“It can make a gamepad fast and accurate, and can free up your hands to do other things, or be lazy while you navigate menus. Eye-tracking is a quantum leap beyond neck-based gaze input.”
So we could be seeing Oculus Rift headsets with eye tracking built in coming in the future. I wonder how long it takes for other VR developers to follow suit and rush to push their headset out.
Source: Gamesindustry.biz
