NVIDIA shares gaze-sensing LEDs for head mounted displays research

NVIDIA published a paper that details the company's research into gaze-sensing LEDs for head mounted displays. Hexus has a summarized version over here. NVIDIA claims their solution is the simplest gaze-detection design to date, it promises to be a small and low-cost solution that can easily be added to HMDs.

Above you can see the HMD prototype created by the Nvidia researchers. Rather than using expensive and power hungry gyroscopes, accelerometers, various optical sensors, and so on - it uses LEDs as the core of the design. The bi-directional characteristics of LEDs allows for light capture and illumination, and the ring of LEDs placed in front of the eyes facilitate gaze estimation. The estimation is done speedily by a "supervised adaptive pattern recognition" algorithm which runs on the aforementioned attached mobile device.

There were still some issues though. While the system shows promise, NVIDIA does not that there are issues with user blinks, and tracking accuracy and its relationship with latency also needs further finetuning.