7invensun, a Chinese HTC Vive accelerator startup, plans to launch a $220 eye tracking peripheral called aGlass next month
Joe Durbin / UploadVR :
Context & Ripple Effects
7invensun is an early graduate of HTC's $100M Vive X accelerator launched in Beijing, Taipei, and San Francisco in 2016, and its $220 aGlass peripheral is one of the first attempts to sell eye tracking as a bolt-on for the existing Vive rather than bake it into a headset.
The arc that follows proves the point of the accessory: by 2018 Qualcomm was shipping a Snapdragon 845 VR developer kit with Tobii eye tracking built in, and HTC itself moved eye tracking onto the bill of materials with the Vive Pro Eye and eventually the $999 Vive Focus Vision standalone.
First-order effects
- Existing HTC Vive owners can add eye tracking — foveated rendering and gaze input — to a headset they already own for $220 instead of buying new hardware, giving 7invensun a revenue path independent of headset sales.
Second-order effects
- Demonstrated demand at the accessory level pressures HTC and its partners to integrate eye tracking natively, which is exactly what followed in the Vive Pro Eye and Qualcomm's Tobii-equipped developer kit — shrinking the window where a clip-on tracker is the easiest option.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, peripherals like aGlass are transitional products: eye tracking migrates from a third-party add-on market into standard headset silicon and optics, leaving specialist startups to compete on software and calibration rather than hardware attachments.
The trend: Eye tracking in VR is moving from aftermarket peripherals toward being a default, built-in component of mainstream headsets and reference platforms.