Oculus has confirmed it's snapped up a startup, The Eye Tribe, which builds eye-tracking technology for computers and smartphones.
The move hints the Facebook-owned company is interested in the tech for future headsets, and that's no real surprise; it's predicted to be one of the next big leaps for the medium.
Read next: 2016: The year in VR and AR
One thing The Eye Tribe has worked on is foveated rendering, where VR performance is improved by only fully rendering graphics in places that you're looking directly at.
If that sounds familiar, it's because the Fove headset, which we took for a spin earlier this year, is already doing it. Oculus could particularly benefit from this technology with Santa Cruz, its standalone headset, which will require more on-board power.
Eye-tracking technology could also help Oculus's avatars come alive, as it continues to enhance the Rift's social experiences, not to mention all the opportunities for game developers it will bring.
Oculus has confirmed buying The Eye Tribe, but is keeping schtum on the details. It's easy to speculate what Oculus is going to do with its latest purchase, of course, but there's no guarantee of when we'll see it come to fruition.
Source: TechCrunch
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By Hugh Langley
Now at Business Insider, Hugh originally joined Wareable from TechRadar where he’d been writing news, features, reviews and just about everything else you can think of for three years.
Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider.
Prior to Wareable, Hugh freelanced while studying, writing about bad indie bands and slightly better movies. He found his way into tech journalism at the beginning of the wearables boom, when everyone was talking about Google Glass and the Oculus Rift was merely a Kickstarter campaign - and has been fascinated ever since.
He’s particularly interested in VR and any fitness tech that will help him (eventually) get back into shape. Hugh has also written for T3, Wired, Total Film, Little White Lies and China Daily.