SHANGHAI & STOCKHOLM – Pimax, a leading player in the VR industry, and Tobii (STO: TOBII), the global leader in eye tracking and pioneer of attention computing, today detailed their collaboration for the Dream Air VR headset. Pimax chose Tobii for its robust, high-accuracy eye tracking solution optimized for pancake optics and compact headsets - a good match for the Dream Air's ultra-compact design and its ConcaveView pancake optics.
The Dream Air is designed to be the world’s smallest full-feature 8K Micro-OLED VR headset. Achieving this form factor while integrating high-performance eye tracking required an innovative approach.
Solving the Pancake Lens Challenge
The use of thin Pancake lenses, which are central to the Dream Air's small and slim profile, posed challenges on the placement of eye-tracking sensors inside the lens structure, a common method in other headsets. Pimax leveraged Tobii’s solution capable of maintaining high performance despite the tight industrial design constraints:
- Low profile, discrete eye tracking design: The solution uses infrared LEDs and eye tracking cameras precisely positioned around the edge of the lens. By pairing state of the art eye tracking components with Tobii’s vast experience of eye tracking design implementation, the overall eye tracking design is discrete - yet offers high level of performance. Compared to the eye tracking system within Pimax Crystal, the size and weight in Dream air is significantly improved.
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High-Speed Capture: The infrared lights reflect off the user's eyes and are captured by an extremely small camera running at 120 frames per second, ensuring the system delivers precise, real-time gaze data with minimal latency.
Speed and Accuracy for Dynamic Foveated Rendering and social VR
The high-speed and robust eye-tracking solution being implemented was essential to the Dream Air's design goals, serving three critical functions that rely entirely on the system's precision:
- Flawless Dynamic Foveated Rendering (DFR): For the Dream Air’s massive 8K resolution, DFR is essential. If the tracking is not fast enough, users see distracting "pixelated patches right in their line of sight." The Tobii solution guarantees the necessary speed and precision to seamlessly render only the user's focus area in full detail, providing massive performance gains equivalent to a GPU upgrade.
- Automatic IPD Adjustment: Eye tracking is used to instantly power the motorized automatic lens separation mechanics in Dream air, adjusting towards the user’s Interpupillary Distance (IPD). This ensures the lenses always align perfectly with the user's eyes upon donning the headset, maximizing visual clarity and comfort.
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Next-Level Social Presence: For social platforms like VRChat, Tobii’s solution tracks minute eye movements and blinking in real-time. This real-time eye data allows user avatars to display natural eye contact, subtle emotional cues, and genuine-looking behavior, dramatically enhancing realism and social immersion.
"Together with Tobii, we took on a real engineering challenge. We needed a precise, low-latency eye-tracking solution that could operate in the tight confines dictated by our Pancake optics," said Robin Weng, Founder of Pimax: "Tobii’s solution delivered eye tracking that is optimized for a flawless user experience with Dynamic Foveated Rendering. This level of engineering collaboration is what allows the Dream Air to offer a 'GPU upgrade' through software performance gains, without sacrificing our ultra-compact form factor."
"Pimax approached us with an exciting challenge driven by their ambitious hardware design,” said Emma Bauer, Senior Vice President of Integrations at Tobii: “Our team takes pride in delivering an eye-tracking solution to adress Pimax’s unique form-factor requirements while also being scalable with low complexity for mass production.”
About Pimax
Pimax designs and manufactures ultrahigh-end PCVR headsets, and works towards the goal of eliminating the boundaries between the virtual and real worlds. Known for its wide field-of-view (FOV) and high-resolution headsets, Pimax continues to push the envelope of what is possible in consumer VR.
About Tobii
Tobii is the global leader in eye tracking and pioneer of attention computing. We are on a mission to improve the world with technology that understands human attention and intent. Creating tech for a better future, our technologies and solutions apply to areas such as behavioral studies and research, healthcare, education and training, gaming, extended reality, automotive, and many more. Tobii's eye tracking is used by thousands of enterprises, universities, and research institutes around the globe. Headquartered in Sweden, Tobii is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm (TOBII). For more information, visit www.tobii.com
About the Pimax Dream Air
Dream Air is the compact flagship VR headset from Pimax, featuring 3840 × 3552 resolution per eye (over 27 million pixels combined) with Sony Micro-OLED panels for unrivaled sharpness. Thanks to Pimax’s ConcaveView pancake optics, it achieves a 110° horizontal and 120°+ diagonal FOV, unprecedented for such a portable form factor, weighing under 170 g. Optimized stereo overlap enhances depth perception, making it perfect for both gaming and professional applications.
