The Apple Vision Pro comes with a feature called EyeSight. This feature, which scans a user’s facial expressions and displays them on a screen on the outside of the headset, hasn’t really been well received. But a new patent suggests Meta might be trying to implement something similar for an upcoming VR device.
The patent, which can be viewed here, is titled “Embedded sensors in immersive reality headsets to enable social presence”. It goes into detail about sensors on the inside of a VR headset that can read changes in a person’s face, and then correlate them with facial expressions using machine learning.
However, as far as I can tell, the patent does not mention an external screen showing a digital avatar like Vision Pro’s EyeSight. The patent only talks about facial movement data being delivered to an “immersive reality application”. There’s also talk about opting out of certain data sharing due to privacy concerns as well as “modifying” a user’s expression for an audience in an immersive reality application.
An illustration showing the proposed sensors and facial interface. | Image credit — Meta
Though at first glance this looks like a copy of EyeSight, I think this will be used for something different. The lack of mentions about an external screen, but so many references to immersive reality applications, suggests this will be used for digital avatars in VR games and apps.
Take, for example, the popular VR social hub VRChat. There are ways to make eye and face tracking work with VRChat provided you’re using a supported headset. If Meta implements what this patent talks about, users will no longer need workarounds like these. And many more VR platforms will be willing to support face-tracked digital avatars.
Of course, this is just a patent, it doesn’t mean anything concrete for now. However, I won’t be surprised if the Meta Quest 4 comes with advanced face tracking as described in this patent.
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Abdullah is an ardent believer in the future of VR, and can't wait to see what more it brings to the table as technology improves. He enjoys covering new software releases in the XR industry, as well as major news about hardware and companies focused on VR.
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