Powered by the Tobii EyeChip, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed specifically for eye tracking, the new Tobii IS4 eye tracking module provides OEMs and integrators with a lightweight platform featuring near-infrared sensors, illuminators, EyeCore algorithms, Tobii’s proprietary middleware engine and a software development kit (SDK). The sixth generation Tobii eye-tracking platform, IS4 is said to be the first to meet integration requirements for consumer devices, such as low power consumption and the flexibility to integrate with multiple system design configurations. The platform can provide a foundation for a variety of third-party, multi-modality applications to be built with IS4, including facial identification, head tracking and facial feature tracking,
Offering both hardware acceleration and vectorized processing, the EyeChip performs the on-chip processing of EyeCore algorithms and has integrated sensor and illumination control. In addition to its tracking performance the chip is said to significantly reduce CPU load, bus load and power consumption compared to other eye tracking solutions, bringing the possibility of eye tracking within range of consumer devices, including PC peripherals, all-in-one PCs, desktop monitors, notebooks and tablets as well as VR and AR headsets.
With regard to VR applications and devices, Tobii has announced a collaboration with the gaming and content studio Starbreeze to combine both companies’ expertise in eye tracking and VR to integrate Tobii's technology into the StarVR head-mounted display (HMD). Eye tracking is expected to help solve some of the current barriers that remain regarding widespread aoption of VR. For instance, it can help enhance graphics performance, save power and reduce CPU load through gaze-prioritized graphics ,also known as foveated rendering. Foveated imaging is a digital image processing technique in which the image resolution, or amount of detail, varies across the image according to one or more "fixation points." A fixation point indicates the highest resolution region of the image and corresponds to the center of the eye's retina, the fovea. Ideally a graphics card would render at full display resolution where the gaze is centered and continuously decrease resolution outward from there. VR graphics can be improved and optimized by, for instance, rendering graphics with higher resolution in the region where the user is looking.