– Hey, it’s Nick Statt with The Verge, and we’re here at HTC’s
CES press conference checking out all of its
Vive 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 kinda lame. I mean eye-tracking’s been kicking around the PC gaming space for a while, but in virtual reality it can be really, really huge actually both for A, accessibility for people who can’t use their hands, but also B, for what’s
called foveated rendering. Now that’s a technique that let’s 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 imagine it would be really big for business use cases, so enterprise customers who wanna make specific apps that take
advantage of eye-tracking. So we get to try a few of those here at their press conference. The first one did not
use foveated rendering, but it did make use of eye-tracking. It was a motivational speaking or 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 fast you were talking,
how slow you were talking, where you were looking at
while you were speaking, whether you were looking
right at the teleprompter or whether you were 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, where you can improve, and a headset like the Vive Pro Eye really makes something like this possible. Without eye-tracking
you couldn’t really make a virtual reality app like this. It wouldn’t really make sense ’cause the data just wouldn’t be there. So another cool demo we tried
out here called Zero Light specifically showed off
the foveated rendering capabilities of the Vive Pro Eye. So it was a showroom app essentially. So you put on the Vive Pro, and you start selecting options for a car that you wanna maybe buy
potentially in the future. Once you’re actually in the car and you’re up close and personal with the steering wheel, the speedometer, the radio, things like that, the foveated rendering really
comes into clear 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 it had
foveated rendering enabled, and it was a huge night
and day difference. I could actually read
the text I was seeing. I could clearly look at
icons and the gear shift. I could read the speedometer,
things like that, whereas on the left in
the standard version it was all fuzzy. It kind of looked like I
wasn’t wearing my glasses. As for how well the eye-tracking works, 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
a kind of like a heat map telling you where you’re looking. We had that in our demos here, and it seemed to work pretty flawlessly, and I could see how this could be a really huge feature for VR. Not just VR games, but
also these business apps, other things like that,
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 don’t 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 basically it just tracks where your retinas are moving as you’re looking through a scene using little pulses of light. 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 it is coming soon, but we just don’t know
how much it’s gonna cost. That said, if you wanna find out more information about the Vive Pro Eye or any of the other cool
products here at CES, keep it locked to The Verge on YouTube at youtube.com/theverge.
