Facebook Acquires An Eye-Tracking Company

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Another year, another acquisition for Facebook. The latest company to be added to its portfolio, is The Eye Tribe, a startup specialised in eye-tracking technology.

Facebook’s latest acquisition is meant to help it further develop its Oculus and VR offering. According to Eye Tribe‘s blog, its product aims at being the absolute standard on VR headsets worldwide, since

[quote]it can enable higher performance of VR headsets with features like foveated rendering. Foveated rendering works by only rendering the specific part of the screen, where the user is currently looking.[/quote]

This could be very useful for Oculus, as it can help to lower battery consumption. Moreover, Eye Tribe has developed a patent pending for biometric eye authentication software, that adds an extra level of security.

While it all points to the fact that Oculus will be the biggest winner of this development, there’s also another Facebook product that could greatly benefit from the acquisition. In an ideal world, Facebook ads could use the technology to track viewability of ads served, and link it back to specific demographics. Cool, huh?