A Comparison of Eye Tracking Latencies Among Several Commercial Head-Mounted Displays

Abstract

A number of virtual reality head-mounted displays (HMDs) with integrated eye trackers have recently become commercially available. If their eye tracking latency is low and reliable enough for gaze-contingent rendering, this may open up many interesting opportunities for researchers. We measured eye tracking latencies for the Fove-0, the Varjo VR-1, and the High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC) Vive Pro Eye using simultaneous electrooculography measurements. We determined the time from the occurrence of an eye position change to its availability as a data sample from the eye tracker (delay) and the time from an eye position change to the earliest possible change of the display content (latency). For each test and each device, participants performed 60 saccades between two targets 20° of visual angle apart. The targets were continuously visible in the HMD, and the saccades were instructed by an auditory cue. Data collection and eye tracking calibration were done using the recommended scripts for each device in Unity3D. The Vive Pro Eye was recorded twice, once using the SteamVR SDK and once using the Tobii XR SDK. Our results show clear differences between the HMDs. Delays ranged from 15 ms to 52 ms, and the latencies ranged from 45 ms to 81 ms. The Fove-0 appears to be the fastest device and best suited for gaze-contingent rendering.

Target Maintenance in Gaming via Saliency Augmentation: An Early-Stage Scotoma Simulation Study Using Virtual Reality (VR)

“…Thanks to the colour recognition subtask and the scotoma radii thresholding, the data were corrected for eye-tracking delays (25 ms). However, this end-to-end latency [31,32,44] is not stable as it can be seen in the results, and therefore may have influenced the scotoma positioning similarly to previous gazecontingent paradigms [44,45].…”

“…In this study, the HTC Vive Pro Eye, which is known to have an end-to-end latency between 58.1 ms [31] and 80 ms [32] was used. Thanks to the colour recognition subtask and the scotoma radii thresholding, the data were corrected for eye-tracking delays (25 ms).…”

“…The HTC Vive Pro Eye [30] headset was used to present the virtual environment. This headset has an integrated eye tracker with a sampling frequency of 120 Hz and a known latency between 58 ms and 80 ms [31,32]. This HMD also has two AMOLED screens, with a resolution of 1.440 × 1.600 pixels to each eye (pixel density of 615 pixels per inch (PPI)), and a refresh rate of 90 Hz.…”

Patients Prefer a Virtual Reality Approach Over a Similarly Performing Screen-Based Approach for Continuous Oculomotor-Based Screening of Glaucomatous and Neuro-Ophthalmological Visual Field Defects

“…Despite leaps and bounds being made in HMD eye tracking technology(Clay et al, 2019), they are understandably inferior in terms of tech specifications to research-grade eye trackers. However, our choice of HMD for the VR framework eventually proved to be reasonable -Stein et al (2021) showed that the FOVE had the lowest latency among a group of HMDs with built-in eye tracking.…”

Application of Eye Tracking Technology in Aviation, Maritime, and Construction Industries: A Systematic Review

“…Therefore, several studies have been performed to evaluate the performance of commercial eye tracking systems in different operating environments. For a detailed review about the methods for performance evaluation of eye tracking and technical characteristics of commercially available eye trackers, refer to the studies performed by Zhang et al [146], Cognolato et al [135], Lim et al [142], and Stein et al [147]. Data quality refers to the reliability, validity, and availability of the eye tracking data.…”