Eye track for disabled

[cmunn]

My father has late stages of ALS. He already has a Tobii computer with eye tracking but he finds it hard to use because of the setup each time. His 11 brothers and sisters want to buy him a vr set with eye tracking as a Xmas present. 

My question is how would this work for emailing, communication, web browsing? He doesn't move anything but his eyes. 

 

How heavy is just the headset?

 

Thank you in advance 

 

@VibrantNebula 

[cmunn]

Please any input would be greatly appreciated 

[SuperNikoPower]

Hi @cmunn, 

While I'm not sure about how the user experience goes, I can say that you'd be looking towards the Vive Pro Eye which is 1.25 lbs. I'm assuming the actual users experience would be tied into software used. 

[HackPerception]

@cmunn - The Vive Pro eye has the correct hardware for this type of use case - the limiting factor here however is that the eye-tracking features of this headset are SDK-dependent which means that each and every individual application needs to download and implement the toolkit and specifically program functionality around it. In other words, you can't currently purchase it and start interacting with software - no common public apps will have support. The focus of the Pro Eye is enterprise developers and advanced developers - this is the type of kit that helps pave way for more widespread support a few years down the road by enabling access to developers today. It is definitely not a consumer facing product and there currently exists no middle-wear software or SteamVR tooling which would allow the headset to drive generic eye-tracking based interactions across the app ecosystem.

While eye-tracking will certainly find use-cases for the types of scenario your describing with your father; the hardware and software ecosystem simply isn't there yet and we're still in the research and experimental implementation stage of the rollout of the technology. There exists no turn-key commercial solutions for medical use cases like this right now and I'd unfortunately strongly recommend against purchasing a Vive Pro eye for your father as there simply won't be any functionality for him to leverage at the current time.