PSVR 2’s eye tracking can detect each eye blinking, letting you wink in VR.
Details of the eye tracking capabilities were unveiled during Unity’s GDC 2022 talk on PlayStation VR2.
As well as tracking what you’re looking at – your gaze – the talk revealed that PSVR 2 can also track your pupil diameter and per eye blink states.
Human pupil diameter expands in darkness and contracts in brightness, but it also changes based on your emotional state. Theoretically, developers could use this to gauge whether you’re having a strong emotional response to what you’re experiencing. Applying pupil diameter to an avatar could change the nature of social VR and the per eye blink states could enable winking in social spaces. Additionally, developers of horror games might be able to choose the moment to trigger a scare in a far more targeted way. We asked Sony to comment about its approach to data collection of pupil diameter and blink state and will update this post if we hear back.
The flagship capability of eye tracking though is, of course, foveated rendering. This means the system only renders where you’re currently looking at full resolution, thus freeing up performance since the rest of your view is lower resolution. That extra performance can be used to improve the graphical fidelity of the environment or port large scale flatscreen games to VR without needing to make lower quality assets. You can read about the specific performance advantages here.
