Experience Ultimate VR Immersion with HTC Vive Full-Face Tracker | CES 2024
Extended Reality
5-minute read
A high-quality VR experience requires not only an adaptable virtual avatar but also the ability to portray realistic facial expressions. At CES 2024, HTC announced the launch of the VIVE Full Facial Tracker for the VIVE XR Elite, bringing powerful eye and VR facial tracking capabilities to standalone VR users. With the HTC VIVE Ultimate Trackers released at the end of 2023, and now with this new VIVE Full Facial Tracker, the XR Elite is inching closer to its ultimate form.
HTC launched the VIVE Full Facial Tracker at CES 2024.The Plug-and-Play VIVE Full Facial Tracker
The lightweight "VIVE Full Facial Tracker" can be easily installed by connecting to the VIVE XR Elite VR headset directly via USB-C. It is equipped with an innovative automatic interpupillary distance calibration feature, which automatically detects the user's interpupillary distance (similar to an eye exam experience) and adjusts the settings within the headset, resulting in clearer images and better tracking. With this feature, even if multiple people share a VR headset, there's no need to manually reset the interpupillary distance each time, saving a lot of time!
Simple and quick to install for immediate use.Three Major Advantages of the VIVE Full Facial Tracker
1. Smooth and Precise Full Facial Tracking
The "VIVE Full Facial Tracker" captures up to 38 facial blend shapes, including lips, teeth, tongue, cheeks, nose, and chin, at a tracking rate of 60 Hz per second. It is smooth and natural, capturing even the most subtle expressions and instantly matching speech with facial expressions and lip movements, potentially enhancing your VR avatar's realism.
2. Foveated Rendering for a Smoother Experience
For eye tracking, the "VIVE Full Facial Tracker" is equipped with dual eye-tracking cameras that track eye movements at a highly accurate rate of 120 Hz per second. It captures not only the gaze source and direction but also pupil size, pupil position, and eyelid opening size, allowing you to be able to more fully and naturally express yourself with your eyes.
This precise dual eye tracking feature of the VIVE Full Facial Tracker can also enable a noteworthy function called ”Foveated Rendering." When we look at an object with our eyes and focus on it, only that object we put our visual focus on is clear in our visual field. The surrounding environment and other objects that are around the periphery of our point focus are more unclear, with things getting blurrier the further away they get from the the center of our field of view (FOV). "Foveated Rendering" simulates this real-world perception effect by reducing the rendering quality of periphery information, which can result in a decrease in GPU load and thus provide an overall smoother visual experience.
Perfect utilization of performance with Foveated Rendering.
3. Support for OpenXR and MetaHuman
For developers, the "VIVE Full Facial Tracker" is also a very practical and user-friendly accessory. It supports VIVE WAVE and OpenXR SDK, greatly simplifying the development process. In terms of game engines, it supports development environments like Unity and Unreal. Moreover, it can even be connected to MetaHuman through the Unreal Engine, taking the realism of your VR avatar to the next level!
Any content previously developed for the VIVE Focus 3's "Facial Detection Kit" and "Eye Tracking Kit" will be compatible with the new generation of full facial trackers.
Extremely realistic MetaHuman.Sales Information for the VIVE Full Facial Tracker
The "VIVE Full Facial Tracker" officially went on sale on January 10, 2024, with a price of 6,250 New Taiwan dollars. Although it is an accessory aimed at developers, it is also a very interesting and useful accessory for content creators and those who love socializing in VR. If you want to get rid of a stiff avatar face, this is the way to go.
