the eye tribe – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

January 3, 2017

Danish Eye-Tracking Company The Eye Tribe Bought by Oculus

There are several technologies likely to make more of an impact over the next year in the virtual reality (VR) industry, with eye-tracking on of the top contenders. Recently its been confirmed that Oculus has acquired eye-tracking specialist The Eye Tribe.

Reported by Techcrunch, details of the deal haven’t been released so its unclear how much Oculus paid, what will happen in terms of supporting The Eye Tribe’s current user base and how Oculus plans to integrate the eye-tracking team into its business.

The Eye Tribe - VR Mask

The Dutch startup formed back in 2011, after the founders met at the IT University of Copenhagen in 2007. The Eye Tribe raised $3 million USD while in the Startup Bootcamp accelerator, and received a $2.3 million grant from The Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation which helped the startup develop its first an eye-tracking dev kit, available for $99 USD and attaches to PC’s. The company also created foveated rendering technology enabling PC’s to run immersive VR software with less graphical processing required.

Oculus isn’t the only VR company looking into eye-tracking. Back in October last year Google acquired Eyefluence, another eye-tracking specialist, with the company saying: “With our forces combined, we will continue to advance eye-interaction technology to expand human potential and empathy on an even larger scale.” Also due to launch this year is FOVE 0, a Kickstarter funded VR head-mounted display (HMD) that’s set to be the first consumer model with eye-tracking built in.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Oculus’ eye-tracking developments, reporting back with any further updates.

December 28, 2016

Oculus Enters The VR Eye-Tracking Arms Race With ‘Eye Tribe’ Acquisition

Oculus has acquired an eye-tracking startup known as The Eye Tribe, a company spokesman confirmed to UploadVR this morning.

According to The Eye Tribe’s website, its technology, allows “eye control for consumer devices that enables simplified and enhanced user experiences. The Eye Tribe intends to become the leading provider of eye control technology by licensing to vendors in the consumer technology industry.”

The latter half of that mission statement is likely rendered moot now that The Eye Tribe has been acquired by Oculus. The former piece, however, holds a major clue as to why the Facebook-owned VR company made this purchase.

There is something of an arms race developing between the major VR hardware companies (Facebook, Google, HTC, Sony) to add more intuitive controls for VR. The solution seems to lie in one place: our eyes.

Recently, Google acquired a company called Eyefluence. This later stage startup debuted its eye-based user interface just months before being swallowed up by the Silicon Valley juggernaut. Eyefluence uses a proprietary system of eye-gestures to do everything they could with their hands and a smartphone with just their eyes and a head mounted display.

Eye controls are the future for immersive tech, but there are other use cases for eye tracking too. Companies like FOVE are having big breakthroughs using eye tracking to enhance social interaction in VR and foveated rendering techniques could make VR/AR more processor efficient than ever.

However, The Eye Tribe’s stated commitment to building “eye control for consumer devices that enables simplified and enhanced user experiences,” makes it likely that Oculus plucked this young company up to compete with Google directly in the spring for eye-based control schemes.

Before the Oculus acquisition, The Eye Tribe had managed to raise around $5.3 million through various investors as well as $2.3 million grant from the Danish National Advanced Technology association, according to Crunchbase. The specifics of the buyout, including the amount Oculus actually paid for The Eye Tribe, remain undisclosed.

Tagged with: acquisition, eye tracking, oculus, the eye tribe, UI, UX

December 28, 2016

Oculus Acquires Eye-Tracking Company The Eye Tribe

The Eye Tribe, a Denmark-based eye-tracking startup, today confirmed they’ll be joining the ranks of Facebook’s Oculus VR.

Both Oculus and The Eye Tribe today confirmed the acquisition with TechCrunch‘s Josh Constine. The specifics of the acquisition are still fairly thin however. Is the company going straight to ex-CEO Brendan Iribe’s new PC VR team in Facebook? Is The Eye Tribe staying exclusively within Oculus? Is there much of a difference? We just can’t say for sure yet.

Founded in September 2011 by 4 former PhD students from the IT University of Copenhagen, The Eye Tribe has since raised $3 million in seed funding, and has also lead a $4.4 million government-supported project to bring eye control to the mass market together with LEGO, Serious Games, IT University of Copenhagen, and Technical University of Denmark. Presumably up until today the company has sold their Tracker Pro dev kit to anyone with $199.

The interesting part? The Eye Tribe has shown their eye-tracking technology working in a range of VR headsets including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Gear VR.

Having eye-tracking integrated into a VR headset doesn’t only potentially mean giving you the ability to control in-game objects with your eyes though. If you’ve been following VR for a while now, you’ve undoubtedly heard of foveated rendering, a technique for reducing the load on your graphics card by figuring out exactly where a user’s eyeball is looking. Foveated rendering is oft considered the next generation technology because it lets VR developers render where you’re looking at a higher fidelity, and render your peripheral view at a much lower fidelity, therefore letting your computer save on its overall graphics load.

We’ll be following further news on The Eye Tribe/Oculus acquisition and updating as it comes in.

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