Way back in 2016, long before the HTC Vive Pro Eye or Varjo, Japanese startup FOVE launched the first commercial eye-tracking headset. Since then the company (like many) has steered towards more commercial applications – especially in the medical industry – announcing today the launch of its v1.0 software update.
While eye-tracking hasn’t entered the consumer field, the technology has been making great strides when it comes to enterprise use cases, from foveated rendering to user analytics. In the medical realm, the technology can aid the diagnosis of eye conditions or dizziness for example.
There are three editions of the FOVE0 headset, split only by the installed software. For medical researchers, there’s the new FOVE Pro software upgrade, offering the ability to measure eye torsion as well as measuring the contours of the eye. A new system has been implemented to allow calibration of one eye at a time, ideal for those who work with patients with strabismus or amblyopia.
For companies, there’s the FOVE Enterprise upgrade designed for use at scale. New features include single-point calibration, faster than FOVE’s traditional method, and then there’s support for NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX embedded computing platforms, reducing the cost of deployments. Both the Enterprise and Pro versions are payable upgrades.
The standard FOVE0 software is also getting an update (this one is free). FOVE is adding official support for Ubuntu Linux. This includes all VR features, such as the FOVE Compositor and eye-tracking.
For developers, FOVE’s SDK for C, C++, C# and Python have seen big APIs updates to help access the new features, along with the plugins for Unity and Unreal engines. For further updates on FOVE, keep reading VRFocus.