This month FOVE 0 begins shipping to those who backed the Kickstarter campaign or took advantage of pre-orders going live in November 2016. Priced at $599 USD the head-mounted display (HMD) will be the first commercially available to have built-in eye tracking as standard, and FOVE Inc. had two colours available, Black or White. In the run up to the first shipments going out the company has now stated it’ll only continue on with the white design, and if customers do want a black HMD they’ll need to be quick.
FOVE Inc. came to the decision to stick to one design simply due to popularity, saying in a statement: “After this first limited-time pre order period is over, we will concentrate exclusively on white-colored headsets. We want to preserve our uniqueness and the design that is different from current mainstream head-mount displays. The amazing people that took the leap and have believed in us by pre ordering a FOVE seem to agree too because white has been a far more popular option.”
The company also revealed two new apps which’ll support its eye tracking technology. The first is Lumen, created by Oscar-winning studio Framestore and Time Inc.’s LIFE VR. Lumen launched last year on Steam for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and OSVR, placing players in a dreamlike world allowing them to grow a forest, but this time with the power of eye tracking.
The other app comes from CognitiveVR which focuses on analytics technology. Their platform allows geospatial tracking, aggregation and analysis of users’ behavior in VR experiences, especially useful for virtual retail environments. Users move around a store and the application analyzes and gives statistics on what the user has been looking at and in what order.
Head to GetFove.com if you want to pre-order the device, and for further updates keep reading VRFocus.