PSVR2: Eye tracking enables better performance, heatmaps and more

At last week’s GDC, the PSVR2 was unveiled in a conference along with a Unity talk. The developers allegedly showed how they use eye tracking in the new VR glasses and what performance advantages result from it.

Eye tracking saves a lot of power

how Android Central reported, the focus should have been primarily on the eye-tracking of the headset. This should enable the device to use the so-called foveated rendering. With this technology, eye-tracking data is used to fully render only the areas of the screen that the user is actually looking at. All other areas in the player’s peripheral vision are only partially loaded.

This saves an enormous amount of power. During the presentation, the developers are said to have shown that GPU frame times are about 3.6 times faster with foveated rendering via eye tracking. Without eye tracking, the performance of the glasses is still 2.5 times better – only the edges of the field of view are blurred.

The demonstration showed that the refresh time dropped from 33.2 ms to 14.3 ms under dynamic lighting and shadows. In another 4K demo, the CPU saved 32 percent of its power and the GPU’s frame time dropped from 14.3 to 12.5 ms.

The benefits of eye tracking

But eye-tracking also has advantages apart from performance. For example, the headset is able to “track gaze position and rotation, pupil diameter and blink states”. In this way, an area in the UI that the user is currently looking at can be enlarged or the data can help the VR glasses to determine more precisely which object the user is looking at player just wants to pick up.

Interactions with NPCs can be better analyzed, which in turn gives more individual options for their answers and reactions. Eye tracking can also be used as an aiming aid. So you no longer have to adjust your throwing direction yourself, you just have to look in the right direction.

One last point is particularly important for game tests, because eye tracking can tell a lot about the gaming experience. With so-called heat maps, developers could track the views of the players and make better coordinated adjustments.