Inseye Lumi is a $160 eye tracking add-on for Quest 2 and 3

Inseye plans to release a $160 eye-tracking add-on for Quest 2 and Quest 3, though there’s no specific timeline yet.

Existing eye-tracking headsets like the Apple Vision Pro and PlayStation VR2 use infrared cameras combined with infrared LED illuminators that help them see your eyes. The actual tracking is done using computer vision algorithms that analyze each frame and derive the size and position of your pupil.

Inseye’s approach is very different. It also has infrared illuminators, but instead of cameras it uses an array of six simple and inexpensive photosensors that measure the intensity of the reflection of this infrared light from your eye. Each part of your eye reflects infrared light at a slightly different intensity, and Inseye’s neural network uses the intensities reported by the photosensors to determine the exact position of your pupil.

Inseye claims its approach uses five times less battery than camera-based eye tracking, can easily run at 1,000 Hz, and has less than a millisecond of latency. In comparison, camera-based eye tracking typically runs at 120Hz and has tens of milliseconds of processing time.

This high refresh rate and low latency means that the foveal region in the foveal display can be smaller, and thus applications can run at higher foveal resolutions, achieve better performance or a balance of both.

However, Inseye’s approach is slightly less accurate than camera-based eye tracking. Inseye claims an accuracy of about 2 degrees, compared to less than 1 degree for camera-based eye tracking. This means that it would not support vision-based user interfaces with very small elements like some apps and menus in visionOS. It also doesn’t support pupil dilation reporting, but this is rarely used by apps anyway.

The $160 price tag of the Lumi add-on for the Quest headset is set to make a healthy profit that covers Inseye’s research and development costs, but the startup claims the photosensors and emitters themselves cost less than $10.

The accessory connects to your Quest via USB-C and the headphone jack, and features a USB-C pass-through so you can continue to charge headphones and use audio equipment while using it.

However, to be clear, this will not magically turn your Quest 3 into a Quest Pro 2. Apps will not use eye tracking unless they specifically integrate Inseye’s SDK, and so this will it is primarily used for PC VR where the open nature of the PC Platform makes it easy to integrate accessories like this via OpenXR.

This photosensor approach to eye tracking could make the feature standard on all headsets in the future, even lower-cost ones. Assuming it works well, I could imagine seeing it in Meta Quest 4, and it might even be how eye tracking makes its way to AR glasses one day.

The Inseye Lumi add-on for Quest doesn’t have a specific release timeline, but you can put down a $1 “refundable deposit” to get it for a discounted price of $100 when (or if?) it ships.

Inseye also plans to offer prescription lenses that support Lumi, as it is not designed to work with glasses and does not support existing Quest prescription lenses.