HTC has revealed some accessories that can be added to the Vive Focus 3 to upgrade it and offer a more natural and convincing VR experience. These accessories include the Focus 3 Facial Tracker and Focus 3 Eye Tracker.
As you can imagine these accessories are designed to offer users a more immersive experience in virtual reality. The Focus 3 Facial Tracker, for example, can be used to track the movement of your lips, jaw, cheeks, chin, teeth and even tongue to convey this into the VR world as a realistic facial expression. When synced with your voice, these tracked mouth movements will look even more believable when chatting to others in a VR setting.
HTC says this will be perfect for virtual collaborations, including in VR training sessions, Vive Sync remote meetings and more.
The Vive Focus 3 Eye Tracker meanwhile is set to make it easier to carry out research, monitor users' gaze and offer more natural interactions during VR experiences.
Like the Facial Tracker, this tech can be used to translate facial expressions in virtual reality but can also be used in other ways. Since the Focus 3 is primarily an enterprise VR device, the hope is that it'll be used to analyse user eye movement, check when their attention and focus is drawn and help companies improve their offerings as a result.
The eye tracker can monitor everything from eye position to pupil size, eye position and eye openness. This can be used for heat mapping and tracking use to study user intent. The other benefit of eye tracking is it enables foveated rendering. This means that the headset can help optimise the experience by allowing graphics processors to work out what should be rendered according to what the user is looking at.
It's exciting to see more of these sorts of accessories appearing as it only means better VR for everyone in future.