What can the eyetracking be used for at launch?

I’ve been backreading some of the threads here, but I haven’t been able to find a clear answer. If I were to order this when it becomes available, what would I be able to do with it once it arrives? I know that dynamic foveated rendering through Nvidia’s VRS is one potential use case for it, but is there anything else?

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DFR is the main big one as it makes a massive improvement in VR performance. It’s like upgrading to a 3080 Ti without actually doing so.

As for other benefits, they’re a lot smaller. I guess its better in VR chat body language communication and automatic ipd adjustment. The rest of the benefits are mainly for researchers/game developers.

From what I’ve read, DFR needs to be implemented at a per-game level (as opposed to FFR, which can be done without that kind of involvement). This article was used as an example, and was said to involve an API provided by Nvidia:

I’m curious to know more about the potential for eyetracking to fix distortion, automatically adjust IPD, and even potentially somewhat mitigate eyestrain. As far as VRChat is concerned, I’d love to have proper eyetracking in that. I play a fair amount of VRChat, so that feature would be a big selling point for me. But, I haven’t heard anything about VRChat actually supporting this; do they?

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I can imagine the use cases in horror games, having something constantly appear at the very edge of your vision or something like that. Any creative dev can make tons of different scenarios for eye tracking. Unfortunately until it really becomes standard on major players headsets I dont see devs taking advantage of the tech.

DFR can actually be activated on any title just like FFR. The nice thing about it is it’s very difficult to see compared to FFR because it moves around with your gaze.

You can also adjust the aggressiveness of it similar to FFR.

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Do you think we can expect a definitive list of what we can and cannot do with the eye tracking modules at launch in the near future?

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I’m pretty sure FFR doesn’t work on all titles? Or was that just bug in a previous version of PiTool?

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any news if RTX series are mandatory for dfr?
(Unfortunately it is for ffr at least)

If so, I am unsure of any practical benefits with eye tracking for me (running a 1080ti)
But if it works that would be amazing.

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DFR is just FFR that moves according to the results of the eye tracking, IIRC. So if FFR isn’t compatible with your hardware, its unlikely that DFR will be, either. I’m hopeful that the eye tracking could be useful for two things in specific, though: automatic IPD adjustment, and distortion correction.

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VRS is a Turing feature, so you are correct. Obviously, in sw it could also be a task that other GPUs can emulate but I don’t see the incentive for its development on the GPU manufacturer’s side.

Automatic IPD adjustment requires the IPD adjustment mechanism to be actuated, this is not the case on current and announced Pimax HMDs. It could of course be used to determine the ideal sw IPD offset once the physical IPD has been adjusted correctly, and that adjustement process could be assisted via the data from eye-tracking.

Regarding distortion correction, it was for a while assumed that StarVR does in fact use its eye-tracking functionality to achieve on the fly distortion correction to achieve the reported disortion free 220 degree FOV. This has since been confrimed to not be the case, apparently they achieved that level of clarity on the hw side. In theory, the eye-tracking data could be used to dynamically adjust the distortion mask but I have no idea how achievable and reliable that is, given the current software and driver stacks.

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PimaxUSA mentioned some kind of demo that was had at CES regarding automatic distortion correction, which he felt showed some level of promise. He also mentioned that the solution is licensed, and that Pimax hasn’t chosen to aquire a license to use it yet:

https://community.openmr.ai/t/is-the-8kx-enough-to-compete-with-the-ever-changing-advances-in-technology/28195/65

As for the IPD adjustment, I’m more hopeful for an onscreen prompt that will let me know exactly when I have the dial set correctly, and then follow up on that with the exact amount of software IPD offset accordingly.

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