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Only this year Apple was granted a patent for one of their acquired eye-tracking patents from SMI SensoMotoric Instruments GmbH. The company’s top engineer, Walter Nistico, is now with Apple as an Engineering Manager, Deep Learning and Computer Vision Team.

The patent notes that eye tracking devices are configured to track persons, especially their eyes, their point of regard or gaze direction. As certain properties of human eyes are different from person to person, usually a calibration procedure is performed to calibrate the eye tracking device, so that the accuracy of the determined gaze or gaze point can be improved, according to the Apple website.

As handheld controllers of virtual reality headsets don’t provide a smooth enough experience, it is suggested that a new technology will provide a more intuitive user experience, letting the wearer interact seamlessly with their environment. Mixed reality offers the advantages of both virtual and augmented reality. A mixed reality headset being developed by Apple will feature eye-tracking technology.

“Apple’s eye tracking system includes a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitting end provides one or several different wavelengths of invisible light, and the receiving end detects the change of the invisible light reflected by the eyeball, and judges the eyeball movement based on the change.” wrote Ming-Chi Kuo, a prominent and often accurate analyst, as reported on by gearbrain.com. Ming-Chi Kuo also suggests that based on hardware specifications, the headset could feature iris recognition, which could act as a form of biometric security and bring Apple Pay to the headset.

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