Tobii Focuses On Foveated Rendering, More Games Get Eye-Tracking Support

[heirdeux]

Tobii has a few long-term plans in the works for integrating eye-tracking technology into VR and mobile devices.

Tobii Focuses On Foveated Rendering, More Games Get Eye-Tracking Support : Read more

 

[Jim90]

Definitely a tech, once perfected, that will become the norm.
Simply focus on one character on the screen and you get the immediate realisation of how much PSU, CPU and GFX power could be reduced. Hugely significant!! more savings?... let's see.... reduced video memory requirements. Now multiply up all the personal display screens in the planet. If 'spectators' are close enough to be captured then they, too, could be added in.

 

[JeffKang]

>The exact functions of Tobii’s integrated technology aren’t clear, but we do know that the smartphone uses Tobii’s algorithms as well as an infrared camera.

What is the cost of adding the infrared camera?

There might be a better approach that doesn't require a special camera.
A MIT research group is trying to provide eye tracking control for everyone using basic hardware (tablets, smartphones, webcams).

They created a deep learning app that crowdsources eye data:

>Gazecapture
itunes.apple/com/us/app/gazecapture/id1025021075?mt=8

>Eye Tracking for Everyone
>K. Krafka*, A. Khosla*, P. Kellnhofer, H. Kannan, S. Bhandarkar, W. Matusik and A. Torralba
>IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016

news.mit/edu/2016/eye-tracking-system-uses-ordinary-cellphone-camera-0616

The app session only takes about a minute to complete.
Look at the dots that randomly appear.
Tap the left side of the screen if you see an L, and the right side of the screen if you see an R.

The current accuracy with 1500 people is about 1 centimeter on a mobile phone, and 1.7 centimeters on a tablet.
If the researchers can get data from 10,000 people, they think that they can reduce the error rate to 0.5 centimeters, which should be good enough for many eye-tracking applications.

Also, there might not have to be use of infrared lights.

>“The field is kind of stuck in this chicken-and-egg loop,” says Aditya Khosla, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and co-first author on the paper.
>“Since few people have the external devices, there’s no big incentive to develop applications for them.
>Since there are no applications, there’s no incentive for people to buy the devices.
>We thought we should break this circle and try to make an eye tracker that works on a single mobile device, using just your front-facing camera.”

csail.mit/edu/eye-tracking_system_uses_ordinary_cellphone_camera

 

[Jeff Fx]

Right now PC gaming seems like the best use for this, so they're smart to focus on that.
This will be useful for VR when lenses are improved, but right now, you could just fully render the sweet spot in VR, and drop quality everywhere else, since we already have to move our heads instead of our eyes to see things clearly in VR.