Social eye gaze

Use per-eye gaze data to animate avatar eyes and build social presence applications.

The Meta Quest Social Eye Gaze feature exposes per-eye gaze direction as a Unity Input System device via the XR_FB_eye_tracking_social OpenXR extension. You can use the Social Eye Gaze feature for social presence applications, such as animating avatar eye bones to reflect where the user is looking.

The feature returns gaze poses in head-relative (view) space. You can use the returned gaze poses directly to drive avatar eye bones without requiring any camera or XR Origin transform.

Prerequisites

To use the Meta Quest Social Eye Gaze feature, your project must meet the following requirements:

  • The target device must support eye tracking (Meta Quest Pro).
  • Your app's Android manifest must declare the com.oculus.permission.EYE_TRACKING permission and the oculus.software.eye_tracking uses-feature entry. When you enable this feature, the package automatically injects both entries at build time. The runtime permission request must be handled by your app, for example using the PermissionsManager component from XR Interaction Toolkit.
    Tip

    XR Interaction Toolkit provides a PermissionsManager script that enables users to request permissions at runtime. You can add this component to a scene and use it to request com.oculus.permission.EYE_TRACKING.

  • For development over Meta Horizon Link, enable Eye tracking over Oculus Link in the Beta tab of the Meta Horizon Link app.

Enable Social Eye Gaze

To enable the Meta Quest Social Eye Gaze feature in your app:

  1. Go to Project Settings > XR Plug-in Management > OpenXR.
  2. Under OpenXR Feature Groups, select the All Features feature group.
  3. Enable the Meta Quest: Social Eye Gaze OpenXR feature.

Configure eye tracking requirement

When the Meta Social Eye Gaze feature is enabled, the package automatically injects the following entries into your Android manifest at build time:

  • com.oculus.permission.EYE_TRACKING: required by the Android OS to grant the app access to eye tracking hardware at runtime.
  • oculus.software.eye_tracking: declares that the app uses eye tracking hardware. The required attribute controls whether devices without eye tracking can install the app.

By default, required is set to false, which means a user can install your app on any Meta Quest device. On devices without eye tracking support, the feature disables itself at runtime.

To configure the eye tracking requirement setting, click the gear icon next to Meta Quest: Social Eye Gaze in Project Settings > XR Plug-in Management > OpenXR.

Social Eye Gaze settings in the Unity Editor
The Social Eye Gaze feature settings shown with the required field disabled.

In the settings window, enable Eye Tracking Required. This sets android:required="true" on the oculus.software.eye_tracking manifest entry. Setting required to true restricts app installation to devices that have eye tracking hardware, which is appropriate if eye tracking is central to your app's experience.

Access gaze data

When enabled, this feature registers a MetaSocialEyeGazeDevice with the Unity Input System. The device becomes available as MetaSocialEyeGazeDevice.current once a session starts and the hardware is ready.

Use a TrackedPoseDriver or bind input Actions to the following device controls:

Control Type Description
leftEyePose PoseControl Left eye gaze pose in head space.
leftEyePose/position Vector3 Left eye gaze position in head space.
leftEyePose/rotation Quaternion Left eye gaze rotation in head space.
rightEyePose PoseControl Right eye gaze pose in head space.
rightEyePose/position Vector3 Right eye gaze position in head space.
rightEyePose/rotation Quaternion Right eye gaze rotation in head space.
leftEyeConfidence float Confidence of the left eye gaze pose, in the range [0, 1].
rightEyeConfidence float Confidence of the right eye gaze pose, in the range [0, 1].
leftEyeIsValid bool Whether the left eye gaze data is valid.
rightEyeIsValid bool Whether the right eye gaze data is valid.
Note

Each of these input action bindings is searchable in the Input Action Asset window that you can use to drive the TrackedPoseDriver.

Tip

If eye tracking stops working when using Input Actions over Meta Horizon Link with Enter Play Mode > Reload Domain disabled, add an InputActionManager component to your scene and assign your Input Action Asset to its Action Assets list. Without domain reload, Input Action Assets are not automatically re-enabled between play sessions; InputActionManager handles this.

Access gaze data with scripts

You can also access the MetaSocialEyeGazeDevice controls via scripts.

Note

Always check leftEyeIsValid, rightEyeIsValid, or the eye pose's trackingState before reading gaze data. The runtime sets these to false when the eye is not tracked or when the user hasn't granted the Android permission. The user can grant permission mid-session. Once granted, gaze data begins flowing without requiring a session restart.

The following example reads the left eye gaze rotation, position, confidence, and validity from the current MetaSocialEyeGazeDevice:

var gazeDevice = MetaSocialEyeGazeDevice.current;
if(gazeDevice == null)
    return;

var leftEyeRotation = gazeDevice.leftEyePose.rotation.ReadValue();
var leftEyePosition = gazeDevice.leftEyePose.position.ReadValue();
var leftEyeConfidence = gazeDevice.leftEyeConfidence.ReadValue();
var leftEyeIsValid = gazeDevice.leftEyeIsValid.isPressed;

Additional resources