VIVE Focus 3 gets facial tracker, and eye tracker

HTC VIVE is expanding its VIVE Focus 3 ecosystem with two new products: VIVE Focus 3 Facial Tracker and VIVE Focus 3 Eye Tracker. The new trackers offer more natural and immersive VR experiences, new options for enterprises to measure user responses, and even more accessible interaction methods such as gaze control.

Through enhanced eye and facial tracking, people can have better engagement in virtual collaboration, which is ideal for virtual events, training sessions, social groups, VIVE Sync remote meetings, and more.

With VIVE’s Wave SDK, and upcoming OpenXR support, it’s easy to upgrade to eye and facial tracking – whether you’re creating in MetaHuman, running motion capture, or animating digital character faces for film or TV. It’s also easy to integrate with Unity, Unreal Game Engine, and Native. PC-VR streaming via VIVE Business Streaming is also seamless.

Express yourself in VR

The new VIVE Focus 3 Facial Tracker makes it easy for users to naturally convey their emotions – and read others’ intentions – in real time. Its mono tracking camera captures expressions through 38 blend shapes across the lips, jaw, cheeks, chin, teeth, and tongue to precisely capture true-to-life facial expressions and mouth movements on avatars.

With a 60Hz tracking rate and optimized runtime for facial tracking, users can synchronize lips to voice with minimal latency and enjoy lifelike interactions in high fidelity. VIVE Focus 3 Facial Tracker setup is easy, as the module seamlessly connects to VIVE Focus 3 headsets through the built-in USB Type-C port with no need for add-ons or adaptors.

The benefits of facial tracking are vast, improving soft skills in presentation coaching, customer service management, training, and more. Users can track and improve their emotional preparedness, helping to achieve better real-life outcomes across many applications, from education and healthcare to human resources and creative industries.

“I’ve always been impressed with how forward-thinking HTC is when it comes to the future of VR,” said Alex Coulombe, Co-Founder and Creative Director with Agile Lens. “Most recently at Agile Lens, we’ve been able to leverage VIVE Focus 3’s facial and eye-tracking technology for an unprecedented portable and expressive experience for live actors. With VIVE Business Streaming’s data transfer capabilities to desktop applications, HTC VIVE Wrist Tracker, and our work with cloud computing, we see a future where performers can put on a headset anywhere, anytime, and perform as a full-body avatar to a global audience without the need for a computer.”

Unlock the benefits of eye tracking

The VIVE Focus 3 Eye Tracker opens new avenues for research, gaze control, and more natural interactions. Bringing realistic eye movements and blinks to virtual avatars delivers true-to-life virtual collaboration and improves human connections in VR through expressive, non-verbal interactions. By analyzing eye movement, attention, and focus, businesses can open the door to deeper user behavior analysis.

The dual camera setup with supporting IR illuminators is capable of capturing data for gaze origin and direction, pupil size and position, and eye openness. The lightweight module easily attaches magnetically to VIVE Focus 3 without impacting the headset’s balanced ergonomics, and the existing VIVE Focus 3 adjustable IPD works uninterrupted to help users find their viewing sweet spot.

VIVE Focus 3 Eye Tracker allows you to see what users see to understand intentions and improve feedback, perfect for training and education scenarios. Measure duration and locate direction with heat mapping and gaze tracking to gain insights about performance and interaction to improve outcomes. VIVE Focus 3 Eye Tracker also offers insight into how users naturally interact with a product, allowing companies to improve the experience by uncovering actionable insights about user intent.

The VIVE Focus 3 Eye Tracker also makes implementing gaze control easy, whether that’s for improving accessibility, or giving people a different way to enjoy immersive content.

Eye tracking also enables foveated rendering, so the headset can intelligently allocate GPU workload and optimize graphic fidelity in the user’s line of sight – reducing rendering workloads on GPUs.

“We’re excited about the new VIVE Focus 3 Eye Tracker and expect its eye tracking capabilities to have as much impact on immersive training applications as the VIVE Pro Eye,” said Jeff Marshall, Founder and CEO of Ovation VR. “As a top public speaking training simulator, we understand that effective visual guidance and performance analytics are key to improving training outcomes.”