Fove VR Headset

Fove is the first virtual reality headset to feature eye-tracking -- meaning, among other things, that characters you view on screen can look right back at you. So far, close to 500 people have pledged nearly US$200,000 to bring the Fove VR headset to fruition.

The Fove has a 100-degree FOV (field of view), low-latency head tracking, and highly responsive eye tracking that is accurate within 1/20th of a degree. It's the eye tracking and the ability to aim with the eyes that are separating the Fove from a growing pack of VR headsets preparing to come to market, according to Yuka Kojima, Fove cofounder and CEO.

Fove's eye-tracking technology employs infrared lasers that bounce light off the wearer's retinas to determine how the eyes are angled. The company's proprietary algorithm, aka "Foveated Rendering," measures depth of field focus by calculating the parallax between the wearer's eyes.
"Fove tracks a user's gaze and calculates where in 3D space a user is looking," Kojima said. "This enables the graphics engine to adjust focus and allocate rendering resources accordingly, giving the user the most natural VR experience."

Kojima already has had a storied career heading up development of several Sony games -- for the PSP, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita and PlayStation Move. However the company she now heads -- also named "Fove," -- foresees the eye-tracking VR headset powering new experiences in a variety of other sectors, such as healthcare, social networking and education. "Nobody has been able to do the eye-tracking right yet," Entner told TechNewsWorld. "There 's some early eyeball tracking in the Samsung galaxy 6 -- and that works, more or less. It's a bit more than less, but certainly not perfect. So it's very cool to have technology that works."