7invensun eye tracking vr china

7Invensun is a Chinese company that wants to disrupt the VR eye tracking sector

Eye tracking is, in my opinion, a technology that will disrupt completely the VR ecosystem, exactly as room-scale did with the first HTC Vive. The reason is that eye tracking will enable a lot of new features in VR, like for instance:

  • Foveated rendering, that will let VR experiences have more polygons and VR devices use displays with more resolution without resulting too heavy on the graphics card;
  • Varifocal displays, as the Half-Dome prototype showcased by Oculus;
  • A completely new UX for VR applications, that will be super-comfortable, since will let you interact with virtual objects just by looking at them, without having to necessarily use your head and your hands. All VR interfaces will change with the introduction of eye tracking, becoming more intuitive.

I’m very interested in eye tracking and that’s why I got excited when I got the opportunity to interview 7Invensun, a Chinese company that is an excellence in this field. It is mostly unknown here in the West because its target market is mostly the one of its home country, but actually, it’s working on eye tracking since 2009, so it has a deep expertise with this technology. It uses eye tracking in various fields and has released a product for Virtual Reality called aGlass. The aGlass consists in two circular add-ons that you insert on the lens of your headsets, and then after having attached some USB connectors here and there, offers you awesome eye tracking for your virtual reality.

7invensun eye tracking vr china
7Invensun logo (Image by 7Invensun)

Since 7invensun is incubated inside the Vive X accelerator, its attention is geared mostly towards HTC devices and they have just announced that its aGlass DK II device is already compatible with the Vive Pro, so the Vive Pro adds another feature to the premium ones it can already offer. You just need a USB-C adapter to plug it into Vive Pro’s port and you’re done: foveated rending on your Pro without hassles!

I’ve not been able to test it in person, but looking around its users manual, the aGlass DK II seems quite easy to install and also easy to be used as a developer, thanks to its handy Unity and Unreal plugins. And if you have an NVIDIA graphics card, it can already offer foveated rendering out of the box! Isn’t it a cool device? Yes, it is! Have a look at this video that showcases all its functionalities:

If you instead don’t want to see a cool video but want to read some specifications… here you are:

  • Accuracy: < 0.5°
  • FPS: 100Hz/120Hz
  • Delay: < 5ms
  • Communication Port: USB2.0/3.0
  • FOV: >110° (adapted to HTC Vive)

Ben Lang of Road To VR has been able to do a hands-on with the device and, apart from some little nuisances regarding comfort, he came out really satisfied with it. And since he is one of the best VR journalists out there, I really trust his judgment.

aGlass DK II is not available on the Western market (probably it will be released in Q3 of this year, at least in the US, according to Road To VR), but you can contact 7Invensun to have it. The first development kit, instead, is available on Taobao for around $190. I hope that you know a bit of Chinese if you plan to buy on that website, otherwise things are a bit hard 😀

7invensun eye tracking vr china
The aGlass DK I available on Taobao (Image by TaoBao)

Do you want to know more about this project? Well, I’ve had the amazing opportunity of interviewing the team of 7Invensun and have a great discussion with them about VR, eye-tracking and their aGlass devices. So, fasten your seatbelt and go on reading.

Hello 7INVENSUN!
Let’s talk a bit about eye tracking. Why is it so important for virtual reality? What will it enable?

Hello Tony! Eye tracking will enable a lot of features, like for instance:

  1. Foveated rendering:
    1. reduce GPU load and power consumption;
    2. reduce hardware costs;
    3. reduce rendering delay and dizziness;
  2. Gaze-Based Interaction: People need only to move the head and the eyes in a small area for a more natural feeling like in real life.
  3. Eye Movement Analysis: A great value for several areas, such as scientific research and marketing, like analysis of clients’ interests, attention, and some other psychological data;
  4. Virtual Social Eye Contact: Recreate Avatars’ many kinds of eye movement to make them more vivid;
  5. Iris Recognition: Eye tracking is a convenient method of detection and identification.
IMHO, eye tracking will be revolutionary for VR because it will completely change the current UX of applications. Do you agree? And how do you envision VR interfaces after eye tracking will be widespread?

Yes, we do agree: VR will change the UX in VR/AR and many things. Along with human history, eyes have always been used as a receiver, to receive information from the outside world. So we think it’s better to use eye tracking as an assistive tool for user experience designing. Using eyes to control things for a long time is not natural and comfortable for most of the situations. However, using eye tracking to select items while operating via other interaction ways such as gesture recognition is more practical and natural. Eye tracking will be helpful to activate the VR interfaces to be customized and result more comfortable for everyone. We can also provide you some detailed applications:

  • Avoid using head-controlled equipment or controller but eye tracking to select options;
  • Eye tracking will be used in most games that needs aim and selection functionalities;
  • Avatar in social games will generally use eye control to show all actions of the human eye, and you will find all the facial expression details;
  • When you look at something, the information about it will be displayed: this way, only the info of the object that you are looking are shown and you won’t be dazzled by info about the whole world;
  • Iris Recognition and live detection enable to work faster and smoother.
7invensun eye tracking vr china
The 7Invensun aGlass inserts (Image by Road To VR)
I’ve read on your website about eye-tracking games. How can eye-tracking improve VR gaming?

VR games is a very popular and important field in VR content developing. Eye tracking can be helpful in adding foveated rendering, to reduce system load while playing heavy games and eye interaction, to use gaze to control or pick items in VR. For example, adding eye tracking in RPG and social games, the movements on eyes such as blink, rolling eyes, wide opened eyes can be shown on the virtual avatar which makes the game more human and interesting. If the user gives permission, maybe deeper emotional information can be expressed.

Tell me a bit about your aGlass DK II VR!

aGlass is the world’s first eye tracking VR add-on. You can use your eyes to do sorts of interactions in VR. Such as using the eye to aim in shooting games, share your eye expression with other users. aGlass DK II can also run the game more fluently, and make the GPU be more effective. if you are a developer, you can also obtain users’ eye movement data and analyze users’ attention, interest points, and other psychological information.

7invensun eye tracking vr china
Another picture of the device installed inside a Vive Pro (image by 7Invensun)
How does your eye tracking technology work?

Basically based on deep learning. The eye is illuminated by some IR LEDs, and one or more IR cameras capture the eye images, then the image is processed by an NN to get gaze information.

Why is eye tracking so difficult to implement? What are the challenges and how are you solving them?

Eyes are moving at a very fast speed and limited space. Every company in eye tracking trade wants to project the minor movements into real world accurately and promptly. So developing an eye-tracking algorithm to accurately track eyes and a method to deal with a large amount of data is quite difficult. 7Invensun is applying deep learning method to get gaze information to let the system adapt to larger range of people and to get more precise data by training the cores.

7invensun eye tracking vr china
The eye tracked by the aGlass product. Reading the website, you can learn that 7Invensun has an enormous database of eye images with which they have trained the algorithm, that so results very precise. Eye tracking is very hard because eyes of every people are very different… and people could also wear glasses! (Image by 7Invensun)
Why is there the need for calibrating the device before using it? Can we avoid this step? In the future will it disappear or this is impossible?

In the human visual system, there is a kappa angle between the optical axis and the visual axis which varies from person to person. In the traditional algorithm, it is necessary to set a fixated position to the participants and let them look at fixated points on the screen, which is calibration, to get the kappa angle. After calibration, eye tracker can use kappa and information of optical axis to calculate visual axis in real time. Then get to know the gaze points.

It is possible to skip this procedure. 7Invensun is trying to find a way by using deep learning method.

How is it easy for a newbie user to start using eye tracking as an input mechanism (e.g. to select objects) in a VR application? Is it easy, because it feels natural or is it hard because it currently doesn’t exist in apps so people are not used to it?

Actually, it is natural for most people to have eye tracking operations inside apps apps. We are striving to collaborate with many content enterprises for developing software including eye-tracking function.

Currently, the most famous eye tracking company in the West is Tobii. How does your tech compare to Tobii’s one?

As you know, in the west, SMI (M&A by Apple) was an advanced eye-tracking company before. Now, we have a good reputation in Asia, and since we provice a cutting-edge technology, we also collaborate with several famous western labs.

Frankly speaking, we only experienced Tobii’s devkit instead of having a product to test. However, we released our first VR add-on, aGlass DK II, in advance in 2016, and it has the advantages of high-cost performance and rapid update of software and hardware exactly. To be fair, we cannot make specific comparisons.

What’s more, 7Invensun is also one of two eye movement technical suppliers of Qualcomm.

On the contrary, we hope you, as a third party, can evaluate products and make a comparison objectively so that it will be more convincing to your followers and readers 🙂

Does your device works only with HTC Vive or is it also compatible with Rift, WMR, etc…?

aGlass DKII is compatible with HTC Vive and Vive Pro. In the meantime, we have VR eye tracking solutions for other VR HMD and many HMD vendors are cooperating with us.

7invensun eye tracking vr china
The easy installation of aGlass inserts inside the Vive and Vive Pro headsets (Image by 7Invensun)
Do you plan to create a version for standalone headsets like Vive Focus, too?

Yes, we are working on it with several VR vendors. Maybe you will find standalone VR HMD with our eye tracking on market.

And what are your future plans in general? When are you going to release your first non-dev-oriented version of the device?

We already have that! Gonna release it with TNT shortly.

How can we buy this device? Will it be available also on Western websites like Amazon?

7Invensun’s eye tracker is only available in China now. If some developers are interested in it, 7Invensun may sent some free units to them. Just for test, not sale.

As a Chinese company, how do you compare the Chinese VR ecosystem with regard to the Western one?

We do have data from the market showing that there are more VR hardware device producers in China than in western countries now. However, when we are speaking to and discussing with developers from the western countries, we can feel that the passion of creating something new and the professional attitude of sharing ideas has no national boundaries.

Eye tracking can introduce some obvious privacy/profilation issues (it’s unpleasant that a company knows everything that I’m looking at in an application). How are you tackling this problem?

The processing procedure is happening inside our brain which makes it really difficult to understand where people are looking and how the brain system works. Eye tracking technology can leak out the information the eyes are focusing on, which will help a lot in learning people’s attention, emotion and even consciousness.

Yes, I do think privacy is a big topic to discuss. For now, most of the eye tracking analysis is involved in research experiments. I believe the participants of these experiments and projects will be told in advance about what eye tracking will collect. The researchers and developers will use their data after getting their consent. In the future, eye tracking analysis should be used under an agreement and authorized private data should be carefully taken care of.

7invensun eye tracking vr china
aGlass can also let you insert lenses that can handle your myopia, presbyopia, etc… (Image by 7Invensun)
Is there something that you want to add?

7Invensun also has made progress on the area of Augmented Reality and we have released our AR solution.

Our applications of eye tracking in VR can be transplanted successfully to our VR/AR eye tracking solution, they only need to be adjusted to the devices and the application scenarios. Applications of VR/AR solution include foveated rendering, gaze-based interaction, virtual social eye contact, iris recognition, iris liveness detection, eye movement analysis, etc.

In addition, we have exhibited our products in AWE in USA these days.


I really want to thank 7Invensun’s team for the time they have dedicated to me, for their kindness, for their interesting answers, and for their honesty (really, avoid comparing themselves with Tobii because they have not reliable data instead of saying that they’re superior is a great sign of honesty). From all the materials they have provided me, their product seems very promising and I really hope that I will be able to test it in person in the upcoming times.

Furthermore, if you have a Vive or Vive Pro and you are interested in eye tracking, I really advise you to contact them. As you’ve read above, if you are a developer, they could also provide you some free samples units to develop your application with… and in any case provide you support in the development of it. To get in touch with them, on their website there’s a chatbot in the lower right corner, but it is too Chinese… so if you can’t use it, try shooting an e-mail to [email protected] .

I really hope that you liked this article. If this is the case, please share it on your social media and subscribe to my newsletter, so you won’t miss other interesting interviews!


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3 thoughts on “7Invensun is a Chinese company that wants to disrupt the VR eye tracking sector

  1. Having also read the review on RTVR I can’t help but say that this eye traking device seems really promising. I think the uses for social interaction will be essential for improving social VR experiences, and of course, FOV’ed rendering will probably lead to a huge decrease of VR barrier of entry in terms of hardware requirements. So yeah, agree that it will be a pretty much disruptive technology for VR that will more than sure be included by default in 2nd gen headsets. In the meantime I will try to send them an email just in case I have some luck and can put my hands (eyes?) on these…

    1. Good luck for the e-mail. I hope to be able to try it next month as well 🙂

      Regarding IR light rays, I don’t know. The only thing that I learned is that for sure they will make your eyes dry faster. So I imagine more eye strain for the users

      1. Have already send them an email, so fingers-crossed 😛

        Hmmm yeah, makes sense. Hopefully it’s just a little more strain, hopefully…

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