With the rise of augmented and mixed reality tech, VR headsets seem condemned to no longer garner the same amount of hype as products such as Magic Leap. Still, companies committed to bringing virtual realms to the consumer are fiercely competing to become Joe Public’s first choice. That’s why, as Facebook announced that it was cutting the price of its Oculus Rift to $349 as CES opened last week, it was crucial that HTC nailed the showcase of the two new headsets it brought to Las Vegas – the Vive Pro Eye and the Vive Cosmos.
With HTC already being a favourite of Island 359 and Hellblade players, it is easy to look at the new devices from the gaming industry’s perspective. On that front, the Vive Pro Eye comes with a significant update – in fact, its only update from last year’s Vive Pro. The new headset has native built-in eye tracking, which means that small rings inside the goggles use pulses of light to track where you are looking. This doesn’t impact the comfort of the device; when wearing it, the trackers can’t be felt at all.
What’s crucial is that eye tracking makes foveating rendering possible – a feature that HTC hopes will set players and developers alike squirming with excitement. This means that the display will supposedly better react to the way the human eye looks by tracking what the user is staring at and increasing the sharpness of the objects on which they are focusing, while reducing it in the periphery.
It should be noted that HTC is not breaking new ground here – the story of integrating eye-tracking technology in VR headsets started as early as 2014, when Tokyo-based startup FOVE announced its own device was coming soon. The crowdfunding campaign for the FOVE headset kicked off a year later, and was a successful one, reaching its $250,000 target in four days. In 2017, the headset started shipping, letting users control VR content using only their eyes, through a technology that calculates the direction of the gaze using both infrared lights to illuminate the eye and IR sensitive camera sensors.
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For developers, eye tracking technology makes it more realistic to work on improving the graphics’ resolution without having to increase the GPU requirements. For gamers, it has the potential to make visuals look a lot better – and HTC’s demos at CES according to those who tried it out, certainly sparked enthusiasm among attendees, who described much crisper images, with neater visuals and less pixelation.
Not so fast. HTC’s upgrade is great news for gamers, but again, it is old news – the Oculus Rift, for example, already uses foveated rendering, though with a different technology that doesn’t involve eye tracking, but instead increases fidelity where players are most likely to be looking. The feature is, arguably, becoming a baseline characteristic of VR headsets designed for gaming. Where HTC could have earned extra points and made a real difference compared to the Oculus Rift, is in extending the field of vision, which firmly sits at 110 degrees: the same as Facebook’s device. That, combined with higher resolution, would have been a gamer’s dream come true.
But HTC jumped on this year’s CES opportunity to establish that, in addition to gaming, it is also looking at alternative applications for its headsets. Indeed, its eye-tracking technology isn’t only about foveating rendering; it can also gather data on user behaviour when placed in different situations. The company showcased the Ovation training course, for example, where the viewer is projected in front of an audience and has to deliver a speech, at the end of which the device can provide gaze and speech feedback, along with ways to improve both. This could be of interest, of course, for enterprise customers wishing to train staff, but also has potential applications in other areas such as education.
What could really make a difference, however, is the application of eye-tracking for commercials – not the least because if advertisers are interested, a lot of money is likely to be made. And if there is one thing that advertisers are interested in, it is certainly in knowing what content catches your eye. Eye-tracking could mean extra, objective and relevant data on the content that consumers are most interested in looking at – an invaluable asset for those who design ads.
For principal analyst at Gartner Tuong Nguyen, however, although eye-tracking has lots of potential for future applications, it is not in the near future that we will see HTC’s headset being used by advertisers. “Who in your friends and family owns a VR headset?” he says. “That’s right – not enough. You can give the tool to advertisers, but it’s only once it is adopted by enough people that it will make sense to start using it.”
HTC, he continues, is adding an interesting tool to the industry, and advertisers may be planning to exploit it in the future – but the market is at a stage where those plans are only ideas.
As expected, the Vive Pro Eye has to operate alongside a laptop, but like its predecessor it has the option to be operated wirelessly by using a wireless adaptor. Keeping up with the wireless trend is probably a good shout from HTC, given the success of Facebook’s standalone Oculus Go, which took the top spots for best-selling products in Amazon’s video game category when it was released in May last year.
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The Oculus Go made 289,000 sales in the second quarter of 2018, in the context of plunging numbers for headset sales, which had been down 33.7 per cent year on year. Yet the release of the Oculus Go, as well as HTC’s Vive Pro – both standalone headsets – at that point contributed to a sudden increase in major headset sales compared to the previous quarter: global market intelligence firm IDC estimated that standalone VR headsets grew 417.7 per cent during that quarter only. The lesser wired the better, or so it seems. And that’s a box the Eye Pro ticks.
HTC Vive Cosmos
The second headset HTC brought to CES remains relatively mysterious. The company has only disclosed that it targets consumer and is designed to be comfortable. The firm announced that to make the device easier to set-up, it is switching to inside-out tracking in action – a method by which the headset carries the device and tracks the users’ position in relation to his environment.
Until now, the Vive headset relied on an outside-in positional tracking system called Lighthouse, in which LEDs and laser emitters were placed to send non-visible light signals across the tracking area, for receptors on the headset to intercept. HTC’s outside-in system is a reliable one, but it means that users are limited to the space in which the light emitters are placed – hence the excitement about the switch to a more flexible setup that has less space limitations.
Giving up its Lighthouse technology, however, will come with expectations that the company has made sure that tracking is as accurate and low-latency as it was in its previous devices.
Although inside-out positional tracking means more freedom, it is not certain that the Vive Cosmos will be completely free of other dependencies: the teaser video seems to present it as a standalone device, but HTC has indeed failed to confirm to The Verge that it wouldn’t need to be hardwired to a PC at launch.
The total freedom of inside-out positional tracking combined with a wireless device, therefore, seems to still be a work in progress, and that could be a significant drawback for some. The company, however, has said that it could be powered by various desktops and laptops, and also suggested mobile platforms. Some may take this as a hint of an imminent HTC smartphone release, especially since HTC’s Cosmos trailer shows the outline of a phone that could be taken for a potential HTC U12+.
This is all rumour, of course, and for now we are only left with the Vive Cosmos’s lightweight design and sleek controllers that could be observed at the show. The company is yet to announce an exact price or launch date for it – only that it would be coming “soon”. Something to keep an eye on for gamers, consumers and businesses alike.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
