The developer kit will go on sale in China from May for $220, reaching the United States from the third quarter.
The Chinese company, 7invensun, held yesterday a demonstration of aGlass, a module specially designed to be coupled to Vive and offer eye tracking. 7invensun is part of the Vive X acceleration program and also received investment from Qualcomm. The module aGlass is divided into two parts, one for each eye, which carry a ring composed of infrared LEDs in charge of illuminating the eye and camera small to follow the movement of the eyes, allowing you to get all the benefits associated with this technology such as new forms of interaction and rendering foveated, capable of lowering the minimum requirements by reducing the resolution and quality of around of our peripheral vision. Each part of the module is perfectly inserted around the Vive lenses, and they connect to the extra USB port of the viewfinder.
aGlass technology works in any application, without the need to modify its code, as long as the PC running the content has an Nvidia card equipped. The company also plans to support AMD, according to RoadToVR. Those users who need glasses, will have the option to insert lenses as they will be placed on top of the original Vive. The development kit will include 3 types of lenses for various degrees of myopia.
aGlass offers tracking, with an accuracy of 0.5 degrees, able to collect the entire rotation of the eyes, 30 vertical and 50 horizontal degrees. It operates at 380Hz and has a latency of 5ms. During the demo they showed in San Francisco, attendees were able to test the effectiveness of tracking with Nvidia’s VR Funhouse application, in which they did not notice any kind of difference when looking at different points of the scene, which means that it works correctly. First, it required a calibration that consisted of looking at a series of points. The game without foveated did not go well in performance, but once activated it got stable 90 fps, according to RoadToVR comments.
The developer kit it will be launched in China from May at a price of $220, arriving in the third quarter in the United States and hopefully also in Europe. At the moment, there is no information about the commercial version, but 7invensun will continue working to improve factors such as the calibration process and other elements of the module, in order to offer better ergonomics, by eliminating the soft rubber fins that rub the corners of the eye.
