Samsung has worked to release virtual reality products of its own, but that's not stopping the company from investing in FOVE, a startup behind an eye-tracking headset.
The FOVE headset has almost doubled its $250,000 goal on Kickstarter with more than a week left to run, but now the company also has backing from Samsung Ventures, Samsung's investment arm.
"With this new investment and from our Kickstarter community, we will work diligently in making FOVE development possible on a large scale. Our goal is to further advance the virtual reality market," said Yuka Kojima, co-founder and CEO of FOVE.
The idea behind FOVE is that it integrates eye tracking into its headset with the goal of making virtual reality more realistic for the user of the headset. While other VR devices rely simply on the direction that the wearer is facing, FOVE users simply have to look at a different part of the scene for the headset to know what the wearer is paying attention to.
This kind of eye tracking does not just help enhance the user experience of the headset, however. Since the device knows where the user is looking in a scene, it can put more processing power toward that area of the display, potentially meaning more intricate scenes and environments can be created. FOVE calls this "foveated rendering," which essentially means that the area the user is paying attention to gets as much processing as possible, while other areas can be somewhat downscaled without a noticeable difference for the user.
While that could mean that more complex scenes can be created, it could also mean that FOVE could run from more devices or even a smartphone, while other devices, like the Oculus Rift, demand serious processing power to run properly.
Of course, it could certainly be this kind of technology that is causing Samsung's interest in the headset, with Samsung having displayed its interest in virtual reality in the past. Samsung has even suggested that it wants to create virtual reality experiences with mobile devices.
It is not known exactly how much money Samsung offered to the company, although FOVE has said the extra funding will be used to "enhance the completion of the hardware production." The company can also now add support for Valve's Lighthouse positional tracking, as well as its OpenVR headset.
"Our investment in FOVE is evidence of our belief in FOVE's superior technology and we believe FOVE will launch a competitive VR device in the market soon," said a Samsung spokesperson.
