HTC Vive Pro Eye, NVIDIA RTX and ZeroLight Push State of the Art in VR at CES

by David Weinstein

Whether you’re building a sleek virtual car buying experience or just want to unwind by taking a few swings of the bat, you’ll want to check out the new HTC Vive Pro Eye headset.

Demonstrating VR’s enormous potential for professional applications and games, HTC VIVE is showing off the eye-tracking capabilities of their new headset powered by NVIDIA RTX GPUs at CES in Las Vegas at the Wynn hotel’s Alsace room.

Visitors to HTC’s booth can experience eye-tracking on the show floor for themselves with ZeroLight virtual auto showroom software and MLB Home Run Derby VR.

These demos not only make VR’s potential for creative professionals and gamers clear, it’s yet another demonstration of how NVIDIA GPUs are propelling VR forward.

Eye tracking combined with a technique called foveated rendering can be used to craft more lifelike VR experiences. The Vive Pro Eye takes advantage of foveated rendering through NVIDIA’s VRWorks Variable Rate Shading (VRS) to tailor the quality of a rendered image to where the user eyes are focused.

VRS is a new rendering feature of the NVIDIA RTX architecture, which applies more GPU shading horsepower to where it will have the most impact, while reducing horsepower to the rest of the image.

This allows for more efficient use of a GPU’s processing power: It no longer needs to render every part of the scene at the same rate.

ZeroLight, powered by a custom build of the Unity graphics engine, is the premier virtual environment for auto showrooms, used by automakers to help customers configure their cars and see the results in incredible detail.

ZeroLight has implemented NVIDIA VRS technology, combined with eye tracking on the new HTC Vive Pro Eye, to deliver higher image quality while maintaining performance. The result is a more immersive virtual experience.

The Vive Pro Eye will also feature a crisp 2880×1600 resolution, which gives it a pixel count that’s nearly 80 percent higher than the original Vive.

This increased resolution will make games look better than ever and create more immersive gameplay experiences.

Of course, a higher pixel density headset will require a powerful GPU to keep up with it. That’s why we recommend NVIDIA’s VR Ready RTX graphics cards for the best VR experience on Vive Pro Eye.