Facebook has acquired Danish startup The Eye Tribe in order to use its eye tracking technology to improve Oculus' virtual reality experience
The Eye Tribe Acquired By Facebook's Oculus
Earlier this week, the first rumors of The Eye Tribe's acquisition came through a Facebook post by tech expert Robert Scoble. According to Venture Beat, the acquisition has been confirmed by a Facebook spokesperson, but the terms of the deal are unknown yet.
The Eye Tribe is a Danish startup company that has been launched in the year 2011 by four students from the IT University of Copenhagen. The startup has been set out with the aim to make eye tracking more accessible to the masses.
The Eye Tribe company provides technology that can enable eye control for consumer devices in order to offer enhanced and simplified user experiences. This kind of technology is a good fit for Facebook's Oculus division.
A developer-focused product launched by The Eye Tribe sold around 10,000 units of its eye-tracking system designed to embed into hardware devices. The developer eye tracking device kits for computers are priced $99. The company's software brings gaze-based interfaces to virtual reality headsets as well as smartphones.
How Oculus Will Use The Eye Tribe's Tech
According to Tech Crunch, The Eye Tribe has also developed rendering technology that allows VR systems to only generate perfect graphics where the user is looking and therefore to save computational power. The technology creates a focal point that moves with the user's eyes.
Despite its mobile form factor limiting its rendering power, this kind of technology could allow Oculus' forthcoming "Santa Cruz" wireless standalone headset to display complex scenes at higher frame rates.
The Danish startup also has a consumer product line and it launched this year The Eye Tribe Tracker Pro with a price tag of $199. The Eye Tribe Tracker Pro allows anyone to connect a device to a laptop or other computing machine in order to monitor eye movement for various tasks such as scrolling down a page, reading sheet music on a monitor or securely logging into the computer. For Facebook's Oculus, having sophisticated eye tracking technology is very important and the virtual reality (VR) division will certainly benefit from the acquisition of the Danish startup.
When a virtual reality headset can track user movement, it can know better what to display. According to the website uploadvr.com, back in 2015, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said that eye tracking is a "critical part" of virtual reality technology's future of VR technology's future. Oculus hasn't shifted away from this line of thinking, even with Luckey's transitioning role. It is still unclear what exactly Oculus will do with the technology, but there are many potential applications for immersive games, security identity verification and a wide range of navigation applications that allow you scroll by looking rather than using your fingers.
The Eye Tribe had taken a $2.3 million grant from The Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation and raised around $3 million from investors including Startup Bootcamp. Earlier this month, the startup's website put up a notice that it was changing directions. On Dec. 15, the Di Digital publication reported that the Danish business register now lists Facebook as the 100 percent shareholder of The Eye Tribe.
