For anyone who’s gone through a calibration process in order to have eye tracking working within a HMD knows how annoying it can be. Yuta Itoh is working on a number of different techniques to be able to automate this process, and is a leader in this area.
Yuta is a Ph.D. Fellow at the Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures & Augmented Reality, Munich, Germany. He specializes within augmented reality since calibration is much more important when you’re overlaying virtual objects within a mixed reality context through an optical see-through, head-mounted display.
Academic VR researchers submit their latest research to present at the IEEE VR conference, and if it sufficiently advances the field forward enough, then they’re published in the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics journal. Each year the TVCG publishes the accepted long papers within a special Proceedings Virtual Reality edition.
Yuta was able to have three co-authored papers accepted as TVCG journal papers, which is quite an accomplishment. Here’s his three papers:
Light-Field Correction for Spatial Calibration of Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays
Corneal-Imaging Calibration for Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Displays
I found it interesting that Yuta and a lot of other AR researchers get a lot of inspiration from the 3D user interfaces shown in science fiction blockbusters like Iron Man and Minority Report.
This calibration work that Yuta is doing could help make eye tracking within VR applications a lot more user friendly, and more resilient to shifting movements of the VR HMD. One of the complaints that Mark Schramm had about FOVE on a recent podcast discussion is that if the HMD moves at all then it’ll ruin the eye tracking calibration procedure. Some of the light-field corrections and corneal reflection calibration techniques that Yuta is working could provide a way to automatically adjust the calibration for any movements of the HMD or for any new user.
Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
