Gadgetory

hey it's next time with the verge and we're here at HTC's CES press conference checking out all of its by virtual reality news now they had a new headset to announce it's called the vive pro eye it's got native built-in eye tracking now that may sound kind of lame I mean I track who's been kicking around the PC gaming space for a while but in virtual reality it could be really really huge actually both for a accessibility for people who can't use their hands but also be for what's called foliated rendering now that's a technique that lets you increase the resolution of an image by decreasing the resolution of those images on the peripheral vision of whoever's using the VR headset that way when you're looking closely at something it actually increases the resolution of that virtual image HTC actually has a whole different idea for the vive pro eye they imagined to be really big for business use cases so enterprise customers who all want to make specific apps that take advantage of eye tracking so we got to try a few of those here at their press conference the first one did not use probe eiated rendering but it did make use of eye tracking it was a motivational speaking or a kind of a public speaking demo called ovation that tracked how you used your eyes while you were giving a speech in front of a big crowd so they did things like tracking how you're faster we're talking slow you were talking where you were looking at while you were speaking whether you're looking right at the teleprompter or whether you're making eye contact with equal sides of the left and the right side of the room and then afterwards it gives you this big breakdown telling you how you were doing whether where you can improve and a headset like the vibe Pro I really make something like this possible without eye tracking you couldn't really make a virtual reality app like this it wouldn't really make sense because the data just wouldn't be there so another cool demo we tried out here called zero light specifically showed off the ova de dren during capabilities of the vibe Pro ID so it was a showroom app essentially so you put on the buy Pro and you start selecting options for a car that you want to maybe buy potentially in the future once they're actually in the car and you're up close and personal with the steering wheel the speedometer the radio things like that the pho be aided rendering really comes into clearer picture so they did a side-by-side comparison in real-time while I was wearing the headset so on the left it was standard and on the right had fovea enabled and it was a huge night and day difference I could actually read the text I was seeing I could clearly look at ICON Zin the gearshift I could read the speedometer things like that whereas on the left and the standard version it was all fuzzy kind of okay it wasn't wearing my glasses as for how well the eye tracking worked well it worked pretty seamlessly you're not really supposed to think about it while you're doing it you're just supposed to move your vision around and usually there's some sort of visual input like a laser pointer or kind of like a heat map telling you where you're looking we have that in our demos here and it seemed to work pretty flawlessly and I can see how this could be a really huge feature for VR not just VR games but also like these business apps other things like the educational apps for sure in terms of how the eye tracking actually functions well they put these rings inside of the goggles on the vive Pro so they're on the outer rim and you can see them pretty clearly when you're putting the goggles on you'll really feel them while you're wearing the headset the comfort level is the same it feels just like the old vive pro that came out last year here at CES and it basically it just tracks where your retinas are moving as you're looking through a scene using out little pulses of way they also haven't said anything about pricing or availability beyond the fact that it's coming in the second quarter of this year so we didn't coming soon but we just don't know how much it's gonna cost that said if you want to find out more information about the buy pro eye or any of the other cool products trade CES keep it locked to the Virgen youtube at youtube.com slash the Birch