One of the surprise announcements during CES 2019 in January came from HTC Vive with the reveal of its enterprise-focused headset, the Vive Pro Eye. Today, as part of NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), HTC VIve has announced that the upcoming device is the preferred head-mounted display (HMD) for NVIDIA’s Variable Rate Shading (VRS) technology.
Variable Rate Shading is a new rendering technique enabled by the latest Turing GPUs like the GeForce GTX 1660 or the GeForce RTX 2060 for example. The process increases rendering performance and quality by applying a varying amount of processing power to different areas of the image. So combined with the eye tracking capabilities of HTC Vive Pro Eye, the two help optimize computer and VR performance.
“We’re continuing to see enterprise VR demands evolve, and Vive is meeting these demands for more toolsets within the headset,” Daniel O’Brien, GM Americas, HTC Vive in a statement. “Coupled with NVIDIA VRS, integrated eye tracking in the new Vive Pro Eye delivers a host of features to take enterprise and location-based VR to an unprecedented level of impact, rapidly evolving what enterprise users can do in VR.”
And to aid developers interested in creating software using eye tracking, HTC Vive has released an updated “Pro Eye SDK” today, which directly integrates VRS for foveated rendering. The Vive Pro Eye SDK (SRAnipal) is available on the HTC Vive developer portal.
“Vive is among the best VR headsets available for professional users, and Vive Pro Eye takes it to the next level,” said David Weinstein, Director of VR, NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA VRS technology, users can now derive the benefits of foveated rendering and super-sampling to deliver the highest quality of visualization while increasing computing efficiency.”
At the moment HTC Vive hasn’t confirmed a launch date for the Vive Pro Eye, simply stating ‘Q2 2019’. Plus we’ve no idea how much it’ll cost. As the normal HTC Vive Pro retails for $799 by itself or $1,089 as a starter kit, expect the eye tracking version to be even pricier. As further VR announcements are made at GTC and GDC 2019, VRFocus will endeavour to keep you updated.