HTC Vive to Soon Get Eye-Tracking and Social VR Capabilities

Image credit: VRFocus

HTC, who has been an early entrant in the VR industry with its HTC Vive headsets, has been passionately pursuing its developmental role since the very beginning of their VR business. Last year, HTC together with some big investors, formed the Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance raising a total of $10B USD for VR content creators along with its Vive X Accelerator Program.

This was done in order to push several VR developments and allow participation of creative and innovative content creators to its platform. However, in its very first year of this initiative, HTC seems to be getting some rich dividends as few startups are now getting new interesting developments like eye-tracking and social VR to the Vive platform.

Eye-Tracking Peripheral ‘aGlass’

7invensun, A Chinese startup, has recently introduced its new eye-tracking peripheral that has been developed specifically for the HTC Vive. Release as the ‘aGlass’ eye-tracking development kit, it includes a series of IR LEDs with a near-eye camera that can determine your eye movements in real time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=eBfWnaEwzRI

7invensun has implemented this solution by using plastic overlays that are extremely modular in nature and can be easily installed in the Vive headsets even by an average user and can be wired to the headsets using USB connections.

The great thing is that aGlass Development kit has already incorporated the famous foveated rendering feature for eye-tracking, and currently support computers running with the NVIDIA GPU. Foveated rendering is a wonderful technique which focuses only the central part of your vision to its full quality and reduces the resolution in the peripheral vision. This way, it significantly reduces the processing power required to produce a high-quality image.

Image credit: New Atlas

Moreover, this development kit also offers support for corrective lenses. This is specifically helpful for people wearing specs and finds it difficult to put on the VR headsets easily. Such users can make their own custom-made lenses which will be placed over the Vive’s lenses as the development kit offers three focus powers.

The aGlass module will be made available next month with limited pre-order sales.

Social VR Experience via WeChat Integration

After the recent announcement of Facebook’s social VR initiative with Facebook Spaces, this time, it’s HTC who has unveiled its new Vive-WeChat Integration that lets you chat in VR using the famous WeChat application. The working of this is quite similar to that of the Facebook Spaces, wherein users will be creating their own digital avatars using selfie sticks. Users can then send/receive messages to/from friends, in WeChat, without taking off the headset.

Image credit: VR Focus

The Vive-WeChat Integration has been implemented by another Chinese startup called ObeN and is focusing on creating avatars and interactions within the WeChat integration.