Back in 2016, Oculus’s chief scientist Michael Abrash predicted that within five years, VR headsets would have a monocular 4K resolution and 140-degree FoV. So by that measure, Pimax over-delivered at CES 2019 with its Leap Motion bundle featuring 8K VR headset with built-in speakers, 200° FOV and optional eye tracking being developed in partnership with 7invensun.

Pimax is now working with partners to make the headsets more extendable with wireless transmission module and bring more content dedicated to the headsets with developers
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Pimax over-delivered at CES 2019 with its Leap Motion bundle featuring 8K VR headset with built-in speakers, 200° FOV and optional eye tracking
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Pimax holds the Guinness World Record for the most successful crowdfunded VR project with over $4m in funding. At CES, they showcased a prototype of its upcoming open-palm controllers, which are compatible with the 8K VR headset as well as other devices such as the Steam VR tracking 1.0 and 2.0. These are ergonomically comfortable with new industrial design, and come in both a thumbstick and trackpad version.

“Science fiction stories like Minority Report and more recently Ready Player One gave us a glimpse into the future for immersive experiences and UI control. Today we’re ready to prove that era is closer than ever before by bringing VR 2.0 to the industry,” says Kevin Henderson, Head of US Operations of Pimax VR, touting thatwith their headsets, users can experience VR with extensive peripheral vision, thus solving the “screen door effect” (whereby you notice fine black lines between the pixels of a digitally projected image) which can sometimes be a problem in VR.

VR 2.0 brings high resolution, wide field of view (FoV) and a more natural interaction as well as the application of innovative technologies, such as foveated rendering, focal surface displays and wireless transmission, will bring a more immersive experience to users in the virtual world.

“In terms of display and optics, in the time of VR 1.0, users suffered from low resolution and narrow FoV, but eye-tracking technology for high viewing performance Foveated rendering technology reduces GPU load power consumption and dizziness, which brings high viewing performance to VR,” adds Henderson, saying they are now closely working with 7invensum, focusing on R&D for eye-tracking technologies to achieve this goal, as well as NVIDIA – the inventor of GPU.

Minority Report and Ready Player One gave us a glimpse into the future for immersive experiences and today we’re ready to prove that era is closer than ever before by bringing VR 2.0 to the industry
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“As a contributor to the industry, we are eager to work with our partners to integrate more innovative technologies into our headsets and make these features easily accessible. We want to provide world-leading technologies to our community and users with a highly effective global customer service and support system and help VR enthusiasts realize their dreams in VR.”

Pimax is now working with partners to make the headsets more extendable with wireless transmission module as well as to bring more content dedicated to the headsets with developers. The company also plans to open customer service centers in North America and Europe customers, with a U.S. based support center due to open in March 2019.

Pimax holds the Guinness World Record for the most successful crowdfunded VR project with over $4m in funding
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For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies our VR Consultancy service offers comprehensive support in strategic deployment of Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Showing Off VR 2.0 at #CES2019 appeared first on Tech Trends.

Companies can now track where a users’ gaze wanders and use that data to design fine-tuned experiences.

Eye-tracking technology is nothing new in itself, but it is gaining rapidly both in scope and popularity as immersive virtual experiences become more widely used both in business and leisure contexts.

This type of technology is a natural fit for VR, as most headsets have inbuilt eye-tracking technology to allow them to deliver immersive experiences in the first place, as gaze is one of the primary ways in which you interact with those types of environment.

Eye-tracking technology is gaining in scope and popularity as immersive virtual experiences become more widely used
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This type of technology is a natural fit for VR, as most headsets have inbuilt eye-tracking technology to allow them to deliver immersive experiences
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After developing eye-tracking commercial solutions for years, Swedish company Tobii Pro is now bringing to market a new analytical tool which leverages these capabilities in Tobii Pro VR.

The tool integrates into Unity environments and allows eye-tracking studies to be conducted within 3D virtual reality environments. It also comes with automated features for visualizing and measures what a user sees, tracking their interactions and navigations within a simulated world.

“Using eye tracking within a VR environment helps us better understand how people navigate around a space. We can design better wayfinding systems and start to explore issues much earlier”, said David Watts, Managing Director of consultancy firm CCD Design & Ergonomics. “We want to bring evidence into the design process, the visualizations tell us what people actually look at and how their attention is drawn to different design interventions we make. This methodology is so much more powerful than relying on our own intuition about what does and doesn’t work. It also provides a great visual record to demonstrate behaviors to others in the design team”.

Access to analytics from eye-tracking data, navigation and interactions is instant and visualizations are automated, with heat and opacity maps showing the points in a VR landscape that received the most attention. Scene overview with path maps illustrate how one or multiple study participants moved through the scene providing an understanding for foot traffic and potential bottleneck areas.

Gaze is one of the primary ways in which you interact with VR
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With Instant access to eye-tracking analytics, brands, retailers and designers are able to analyze the key influencers of behavior and decision-making throughout the consumer journey, according to Tom Englund, President, Tobii Pro.

A retailer, for example, can quickly iterate between layouts of a store design and track the visual attention to arrive at one that is optimized to how shoppers walk the space and pick up items along the way, while commercial brands can test variations of product packaging within a realistic virtual store setup to see which are most likely to get picked from the shelf by the customer.

With attention spans getting ever shorter and users perceptual vigilance getting more difficult to bypass, this kind of analytics is gaining in popularity
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With Instant access to eye-tracking analytics, brands, retailers and designers are able to analyze the key influencers of behavior and decision-making throughout the consumer journey
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There are many other potential applications of this type of technology beyond sales and consumer engagement, however. A manufacturing company can place workers in different training scenarios to evaluate reactions and responses. Eye tracking will help determine what can be done to help workers identify the warning signs of an accident before one occurs. As Englund explains, this new VR analysis tool opens up the possibility for much more efficient, engaging and safer training of individuals particularly in complex and high-risk occupations such as industrial, medical, and emergency response.

“Eye tracking has proved to be a natural part of VR, and the launch of Tobii Pro VR Analytics is major step towards our larger vision to also provide businesses and researchers with the tools to capture insights from these immersive environments. VR puts you in complete control of an environment while eye tracking explains our behavior while in that world – a powerful combination making the behavioral insights accessible to many more people.”

Within a hospital environment, for instance, it is possible to deploy this technology to accurately simulate specific types of surgery (in fact there are many products which also add a haptics layer to those simulations for even greater levels of realism) and observe the attention and visual skills of surgeons as they practice performing complex techniques. This allows teachers and supervisors to track factors such as how aware a student is of their surroundings or how often they check instruments and displays for example. It also allows them to make mistakes and get constructive and concrete feedback on those without impacting on a real patient’s health.

Eye tracking has proved to be a natural part of VR
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“A construction company could lay out a whole building design during the concept phase and track people’s attention and navigation to determine optimal placement of signage and functions such as emergency exits,” adds Englund.

With attention spans getting ever shorter and users perceptual vigilance getting more difficult to bypass, this kind of analytics is gaining in popularity. One clear advantage of relying on eye-tracking techniques is that it tends to capture much more candid results, as you are not relying on eliciting verbal responses from the user. In fact, users might not always be aware of where their attention is wandering, as many such moves happen on the periphery of our consciousness, so the combination of eye tracking and VR can uncover the factors that drive human attention across an unlimited number of scenarios.

This article was originally published on Forbes

Looking Through Your User’s Eyes With Virtual Reality Gaze Trackinghttps://t.co/Mj9Vog5ywm

— Forbes Tech News (@ForbesTech) June 21, 2018

To find out how to leverage VR/AR/MR in your enterprise, Tech Trends offers bespoke Virtual Reality Consultancy support

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post #BuildTheFuture > Gaining Behavioural Insight with Eye-Tracking VR Tech appeared first on Tech Trends.