Ultracompact eye and pupil tracking device using VCSEL arrays and position sensitive detector
Abstract
Eye tracking is one of the essential technologies for near-eye display systems, providing natural and involuntary humanmachine interfaces for application scenes of AR, VR, and MR. In this paper, novel type of an eye-tracking device is proposed, which consists of VCSEL array and PSD for realizing a triangulation system, and operates non-video based and non-mechanical. The PSD detects spatial position of a laser beam spot emitted from a certain light source and reflected from the surface of the cornea, relating to microscopic eye orientation. While, the spatially-aligned light emitters, i.e., VCSEL array, play an important role to expand detection angle of eye movement because slight change of light-incident angle on the cornea due to the difference of light-emitter positions transforms the corresponding angle into spatial information folded on a light receiving surface of the PSD. Such operations denote detections of coarse and fine movements of the eye, respectively. A notable feature of this device is that faint light from each light emitter identifies the position of laser beam spot with the help of the lock-in detection technique. The operation principle has been evaluated numerically and experimentally, and a prototype eye-tracking module with the size enough small to be mounted on glass frames has been demonstrated. These results have suggested possibility for realizing eye tracker with battery-powered driving, ultimate low processing load and data transfer amount that are our final speculation for this device.
- Publication:
-
Optical Architectures for Displays and Sensing in Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality (AR, VR, MR)
- Pub Date:
- February 2020
- DOI:
- 10.1117/12.2542593
- Bibcode:
- 2020SPIE11310E..1FS