Whether you’re an experienced designer, programmer, engineer, or maybe you’ve just been inspired after reading VRFocus’ articles – either way, you have stumbled across the weekly VR Job Hub. The vacancies listed here are usually located worldwide, from major companies to humble indie developers – the one thing they all have in common is that they are all looking for new staff.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Earlier this year Tobii and HTC Vive partnered to bring foveated rendering tech to the new HTC Vive Pro Eye. Now, Tobii is opening its platform up for others to use.
At Siggraph this week the company announced Tobii Spotlight Technology. It’s essentially the same tech already utilized in Vive Pro Eye. Tobii’s eye-tracking technology is able to decipher the specific area of a VR display the user is looking at. The headset then only fully renders the direct center of that area. Areas away from the center of your vision aren’t fully rendered. This is imperceptible to your peripheral vision.
This drastically reduces the strain on hardware processing a VR experience. As such, foveated rendering is largely considered to be one of the key components of bringing VR costs down in the future. A Tobii spokesperson told UploadVR that “Spotlight Technology is intended to support a variety of headsets, including both tethered and standalone headsets.” News on software development kits (SDKs) for Spotlight will also be coming “soon.”
Specific partners weren’t announced today. Vive Pro Eye is an enterprise-level headset, though. Hopefully this news means we’ll start to see eye-tracking in other, consumer-focused devices soon.
Tobii did provide its own benchmarking results for using dynamic foveated rendering in Epic’s ShowdownVR app with the Vive Pro Eye running on Nvidia RTX 2070. You can see those results above, though obviously take note that these are company-generated stats and not something we can verify ourselves.
As part of the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2019 this week, eye tracking specialist Tobii has announced a new software development kit (SDK) for XR applications.
The Tobii XR SDK features a number of tools and resources for developers to use, enabling them to design immersive interactions that take advantage of head-mounted displays (HMD) with built-in eye tracking technology. Features include Tobii Intelligent Objects which allow users to select items intuitively using machine learning and algorithms to map eye tracking signals to objects in a scene.
Or how about improving user interfaces so that navigation can become smoother and faster, with streamlined menus and unnecessary UI elements hidden when the user is looking elsewhere. Another use for videogame makers or social VR app creators is that eye to eye social contact, either with an NPC or chatting with someone on the other side of the world. Humans naturally respond to eye movement during a conversation, making for a more natural response.
“GDC is all about developers, so this year we wanted to provide the developer community with the most advanced and easy to implement set of APIs, guides, code samples, and tutorials that have ever existed for eye tracking integration,” said Henrik Eskilsson, CEO Tobii in a statement. “With the launch of these new SDKs, development tools and resources, it is now easier than ever before for developers to take advantage of eye tracking technology to create extraordinary experiences for users.”
“Eye tracking is quickly becoming a required standard in XR devices. Tobii is the leading supplier of eye tracking technology and the most experienced company in the eye tracking ecosystem,” Eskilsson adds. “We are bringing all of that knowledge to these new development tools and giving application developers a powerful advantage for creating extraordinary eye tracking interactions.”
In addition to new libraries and APIs for XR interactions, Tobii is making code samples, videos, tutorials and debugging tools available for XR development, along with packages and assets for Unity with Unreal support coming soon. For further updates from Tobii, keep reading VRFocus.
Eye-tracking specialist Tobii is honing in on VR and AR developers at GDC this week.
The company yesterday announced the launch of its XR software development kit (SDK). It’s a set of tools and resources designed to get developers up to speed with its eye-tracking tech. Using the kit, creators can implement features like gaze-based selection and eye-tracked interfaces. Tobii also says it includes tools to mirror a user’s eye movements on a VR avatar for social VR applications.
Eye-tracking as a key part of VR’s future. Not only because it enables new forms of interaction and social VR capabilities but because of performance too. One day the tech will be used to enable foveated rendering in VR headsets. This is a process that only fully renders the exact part of the VR display users are looking at. The rest of the screen isn’t fully rendered, but the difference can’t be seen in your peripheral vision. This greatly reduces the demands on whatever’s powering the VR experience.
That said, eye-tracking isn’t yet a feature in most consumer VR headsets. The newly-announced Oculus Rift S doesn’t include it, for example. Tobii itself partnered with HTC to implement its tech in the upcoming Vive Pro Eye, but this is an enterprise-level device. Some form of eye-tracking could also be integrated into Valve’s still-unannounced SteamVR headset.
When HTC Vive held its CES 2019 press conference last Monday the company made one of the biggest virtual reality (VR) announcements of the show, the HTC Vive Pro Eye. A new VR headset with built-in eye-tracking supplied by Tobii, VRFocus then caught up with the eye-tracking specialist to learn more.
Speaking to President, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Tobii, Henrik Eskilsson, he described how CES 2019 and the past year had been fantastic for the company thanks to partnerships with Alienware and HTC Vive, alongside seeing wider use cases for eye-tracking technology.
Eskilsson goes on to explain some of the fundamental use cases for eye-tracking, and why it can be inherently useful for VR headsets. It’s a topic VRFocus has keenly covered several times in the past. Firstly, eye-tracking can help to provide a far more realistic and natural approach to digital avatar interaction, being able to gauge what a user’s eyes are doing is a fundamental form of social interaction, knowing if someone is happy or sad for example.
Then there’s the tech use, or more precisely, foveated rendering. It’s a process which helps reduce the graphical load on a GPU by only rendering in maximum detail where someone is looking. While in their peripheral vision the quality is reduced, thus helping less powerful GPU’s run complex scenes or powerful GPU’s make a scene look even better.
There are of course other use cases such as using eye-tracking as a selection tool in menu’s for example, or for those who may not have much or any use of their arms.
Check out the video below to find out more about Tobii’s latest eye tracking efforts. VRFocus’ video producer Nina also went hands-on with the new HTC Vive Pro Eye headset finding out how good the integration between Tobii and HTC Vive Pro was. The HTC Vive Pro Eye is being targeted towards enterprise rather than the consumer market. There’s still no word on cost, but it is due for release sometime in Q2 2019.
Tobii and HTC Vive weren’t the only ones showcasing integrated eye-tracking at CES 2019, with Pimax and 7invensun demoing their wares. For more eye-tracking related updates, keep reading VRFocus.
At CES 2019, HTC revealed the “Vive Pro Eye” featuring eye tracking from Tobii. Several demos from Vive partner developers showcased potential use cases for the Vive Pro Eye.
A company called Zero Light, for example, showed how Vive Pro Eye could be used with foveated rendering for increased clarity in the tiny details of a virtual car’s interior. By its nature foveated rendering should be invisible to the eyes, so Zero Light toggled various modes to show the eye tracking and rendering areas in various ways. Areas directly in front of the eyeball were supersampled at a resolution many times that of the panel. It was shown on a Quadro RTX 6000 and the supersampling improvements weren’t readily apparent to my eyes on the Vive Pro panel. One of the modes, though, showed green, yellow and red areas to indicate where the eye is pointed. In VR, this mode appeared to reflect where each eye was pointed very accurately. Members of the team also used it with glasses on and it worked fine.
A separate demo from Tobii itself in a Vive Pro showed a simple interactive game with creatures coming toward me. The eye tracking hardware could be used to essentially upgrade aim assist just by shooting a box in the game. Once I realized how much targeting these creatures was helped by eye tracking I only lasted 10-15 seconds before turning the feature on and leaving it on for the duration of the demo. This demo also used adjustable lines to show lower and higher resolution regions to my eyes.
Another demo from HTC’s partners showing at CES 2019 revealed how eye tracking could be used to assist in teaching an aircraft takeoff procedure, with each switch highlighted by the software and then “selecting” it by gazing continuously at the tiny switch for a brief time. This is how some simple interactions in VR are already handled on a headset with no other interactions — with a few smallish buttons and a few seconds of head gaze used to indicate intent. Most often, this is used to play videos.
Eye tracking, though, like the kind being shipped in Vive Pro Eye Tobii, uses sensors inside the headset to make the area of interest more specific than ever before. When incorporated into game design, this intent of the player could be used to hone the reactivity of characters or the environment. By tracking that gaze over the length of the play period, though, deeper insights can be learned for bigger changes in software design, or player behavior.
For instance, below is a screenshot I took after the aircraft training demo showing a record of where my eyes were focused throughout my flight. If I was training to become a pilot and spending too much time looking out the windows instead of focused on the controls, this data could let help inform and improve my next trip in the simulator.
Tobii’s eye tracking requires a very brief training session when putting the headset on. There’s also a dialog on-screen that shows the wearer how to turn a dial on Vive Pro to better align the panels directly in front of the eyes.
Overall, Tobii’s eye tracking seemed to work across a variety of demos but its real-world benefits are still unclear. Vive Pro Eye is likely to be a high-end version of a high-end headset used for very specific use cases by developers, like interaction research.
DisplayLink has been building out its wireless VR compression technology for the last few years, eventually finding its way into the recently released Vive Wireless Adapter. But VR headsets are inevitably moving toward higher resolutions—as we’ve seen this week at CES 2019—making it increasingly harder to make them wireless. Luckily DisplayLink has a few tricks up its sleeve to boost compression efficiency without impacting latency, one of which they demonstrated exclusively to Road to VR this week at CES 2019.
Many readers of Road to VR will be familiar with the concept of foveated rendering: since our eyes only see in high fidelity within a few degrees of the center of our field of view, it’s possible to achieve higher quality (or more efficiency) by rendering lower quality imagery in the peripheral regions and higher quality in the very center. Eye-tracking then can be used to make sure that the high quality region always stays at the center no matter how you move your eye. Done right (with good eye-tracking and smart rendering algorithms) this can be completely invisible to the end users.
DisplayLink is using this same concept, except for compression instead of rendering. Compression is critical to wireless VR because you need to be able to send high resolution imagery at high framerates over a wireless connection that sometimes experiences sudden drops in bandwidth due to the imperfect nature of wireless connections.
Maintaining smooth visuals is key to preventing freezing and stuttering which would hamper any wireless VR experience. To maintain consistency in the imagery, DisplayLink has designed their compression technology to be able to respond to changes in bandwidth on the fly—even in the middle of a frame—so that if, for instance, a user’s hand briefly blocks an antenna, the system can apply more compression to make sure the image can fit over the reduced bandwidth.
Beyond just maintaining consistent imagery under situations of reduced bandwidth, there’s also the need to be more efficient with compression so that larger frames for future headsets with higher resolution can fit in the same available bandwidth.
Both reasons are why DisplayLink is developing foveated compression which takes advantage of eye-tracking data to understand where to compress the frame the most and where to leave it sharp. In doing so, the company claims some pretty huge gains in compression efficiency.
Photo by Road to VR
Using a Vive headset equipped with Tobii eye-tracking, DisplayLink showed me a demo using their wireless adapter reference design. Initially the adapter was set to use the same amount of bandwidth available in the Vive Wireless Adapter to get the image to the headset. Then they turned on foveated compression and cut the available bandwidth down to 1/3.
To my eyes the difference between the full bandwidth image and the 1/3 bandwidth image (with foveated compression) looked effectively identical. Even as I raced my eyes around the scene in an effort to catch the edges of the more highly compressed regions, I was wasn’t able to see anything more than a fleeting glimpse of a slightly blocky region in my peripheral, and this is as I was actively trying to spot any visual artifacts.
Even when I asked them to switch rapidly back and forth between full bandwidth mode and 1/3 bandwidth mode with foveated compression, it was difficult to spot any meaningful differences between the two. Had they handed me the headset from the start with foveated compression enabled (without telling me), I don’t think I’d have any idea it was happening, and that’s exactly how it should work.
Photo by Road to VR
There’s a few caveats of course: this was a proof of concept demo and I only got to see one piece of content (just standing around in the SteamVR home area). So I don’t know if this foveated compression approach will be valid for all or even most content. It’s possible that it won’t work so well with more complex colors, contrast, and lots of motion. The demo I saw was also on the original Vive, which has a fairly low resolution compared to what else is out there. Higher resolution (like the Vive Pro Eye, which DisplayLink plans to support, and even better lenses) might make it harder to hide the foveated compression.
However, the foveated compression is fundamentally based on DisplayLink’s existing compression technology, which works pretty darn well for today’s VR headsets, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find the the foveated approach works well too.
The new competitive gaming lessons program Alienware Academy is now open to the public to assist with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and it supports Tobii eye tracking for analytics.
HTC revealed the Vive Pro Eye with eye-tracking support at its CES 2019 press conference on January 7. We now know that Tobii will be the company responsible for integrating the technology.
Tobii announced today that it is the supplier of the eye tracking technology for HTC’s new Vive Pro Eye VR headset. HTC announced the Vive Pro Eye durings its special press event yesterday.
The company highlighted use cases such as more authentic avatars in social VR and gaze based UIs. More importantly however, HTC states it enables foveated rendering.
Foveated rendering is a process which renders most of the view of a VR headset at lower resolution except for the exact area where the user’s eye is pointed, which is detected with eye tracking. That area in front of the eye — where humans perceive the greatest detail — is rendered at a significantly higher resolution. Foveated rendering is considered crucial for future advancement of VR as it allows for higher resolutions without impossible GPU requirements.
Tobii first announced it was working with a major VR company in late 2018. It’s now clear that company is HTC. Combined with the company’s partnership with NVIDIA, HTC now has access to the full stack of technologies it needed for foveated rendering.
The new Vive Pro Eye headset is being shown off at both companys’ booths at CES. We’ll be posting our detailed impressions later this week.
