Eye Tracker in VR

Eye tracking in VR (or gaze tracking) is a technology for measuring the gaze direction of a user. When combined with positional head tracking, one can determine the exact point the user is looking at in the real or virtual world. Apart from detecting the point of interest, the system provides information about fixations (whether a user is focusing on something), saccades, and other eye motion patterns such as blinking and pupil dilation. This technology can have enormous benefits for researchers or application developers, as they can study human behavior in virtual environments or create interactions solely based on the user’s gaze.

Eye tracking is already widely utilized in many fields of research, including marketing, psychology, medicine, usability, and user behavior. It also has many important use cases in VR/AR and is rapidly becoming a standard feature in high-end headsets. Examples include automatic inter-pupillary distance (IPD) adjustment, detecting when a headset is worn, and automated user detection through iris recognition. It can also be used as a control mechanism in user interfaces, and to improve the realism of social avatars.

Varjo XR-4 Series headsets all have integrated eye tracking functions with 1-degree accuracy.

eye tracking in VR — An example of gaze tracking in VR. The yellow circle indicates the user’s gaze and shows how it moves around in real-time across the VR environment, in this case, a flight control tower.

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