An update on my standalone eye tracking project which is turning more into a standalone OpenXR overlay-toolkit-thingy. The debug UI can now be toggled and interacted with. Also has a new working toggle for local dimming on QPro (impossible to toggle otherwise in Steam Link, Valve c'mon).

After that I made another attempt at replacing the casing and my soldering started to fail and eventually one of the TMR sensors disappeared, which was the end of the experiment. So, here I'm hoping this would inspire someone to make this dream come true for the VR community.

So a good friend of mine suggested trying simply connecting the stick first, and later try to fit it. The TMR pinout is not compatible, so I had to solder some wires to fix that, which unfortunately I couldn't find thinner ones for the purpose. Quite tricky.

They were also surprisingly similar inside, but slightly different after all, and the TMR flex PCB in particular had a metal plate underneath it, which made it thicker. Trying to remove the backplate popped off some very small component and that was it.

Dimension wise they are almost identical to Q2 sticks, also have 5 pins, so they looked like good candidates for testing. I destroyed the first stick out of two trying to first make the original case fit and later trying to replace TMR components into Q2 stick.

- Implements the `XR_EXT_eye_gaze_interaction`, `XR_FB_eye_tracking_social`, and `XR_FB_face_tracking2` extensions (same as QPro) to allow Steam Link request ET/FT data.
- Replies to the ET/FT requests with the data from the model, effectively providing foveated encoding as well.

This is an OpenXR API Layer that's compiled into a shared library (.so) and some JSON metadata, inserted into Steam Link APK file as per OpenXR docs to be loaded as a layer. A layer is pretty much a middleware and as a layer dev you can intercept and modify any calls!

Here's another project I've been working on for quite a long time now and very excited with what I achieved. This runs completely locally on Quest 2 with the cameras connected with USB, and ET/FT data is injected into Steam Link, which then goes into VRCFT same as QPro.

I also got some GC0308 camera boards to try them for face and, more importantly, eye tracking. The seller advertises 120 fps at 320x240 resolution, which is perfect for eye tracking, and the module itself is exposed as a standard UVC device (webcam). Which means no more serial stuff like with ESPs.

I'm thinking about starting to post some updates here about the stuff and projects I work on, so here we go.

Got a bunch of stuff for new Smol Slimes, will be working on the case soon while waiting for the batteries to arrive. I found that I have 2 compatible batteries, so I'll use that first.