SensoMotoric Instruments

SensoMotoric Instruments
Information
Industry	Eye tracking, computer vision
Founded	1991
Founder	Winfried Teiwes and his academic mentors
Headquarters	Teltow, near Berlin, Germany
Notable Personnel	Winfried Teiwes (CEO 1991-2008), Eberhard Schmidt (managing director, 2014), Christian Villwock (OEM director, 2016)
Products	RED and iView X eye trackers, SMI Eye Tracking Glasses, eye tracking upgrades for VR headsets
Parent	Apple (reported acquisition, 2017)
Website	smivision.com (offline)

SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) was a German maker of eye tracking systems, based in Teltow near Berlin. It was founded in 1991 by Winfried Teiwes and his academic mentors as a spin-off from academic and medical research at the Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin), and for most of its history it sold eye trackers to researchers and professionals.

From 2014 SMI adapted its eye tracking to virtual reality headsets. It released an eye tracking package for the Oculus Rift DK2 in 2014, showed foveated rendering on modified headsets at trade shows in 2016 and 2017, and supplied the modified HTC Vive headsets used in demonstrations by NVIDIA and Valve. In June 2017 MacRumors reported that Apple had bought the company through a shell company. Apple did not give details and answered press questions with its standard statement on small acquisitions. Its Eye Tracking Glasses are listed as no longer manufactured or sold.

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Founding, company self-description, 2014-2017 VR eye tracking releases and demos, the reported 2017 Apple acquisition and post-sale product status checked against every cited source. About review dates.

History

Founding and research business

According to the company, SMI was the first company to offer a commercial, vision-based 3D eye tracking system. Teiwes was its CEO from 1991 until 2008, when he left to lead OD-OS GmbH, an SMI spin-off working on navigated laser therapy for retinal disease. In 2016 SMI listed three main fields: eye and gaze tracking systems for research, professional use and industry; high-speed image processing; and eye tracking and registration for ophthalmology. It said that more than 6,000 of its systems had been installed worldwide, and it served customers from offices in Teltow and in the Boston area. Daily Research News Online gave the US office location as Needham, near Boston.

SMI's November 2014 press release listed users at the University of Rochester, the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, Harvard University, Humboldt University of Berlin, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. The same release gave Eberhard Schmidt as managing director and Warthestrasse 21, Teltow, as the company address. In 2013 the company added 3D eye tracking for analyzing real-time gaze interaction in virtual environments. It later released Automated Semantic Gaze Mapping (ASGM), which aggregates gaze data from eye tracking videos.

Move into VR and AR (2014-2017)

At the Society for Neuroscience meeting in November 2014, SMI announced what it called "the world's first Eye Tracking solution for the Oculus Rift DK2 HMD". The package included an SDK that streamed eye and gaze data in real time and supported Unity and WorldViz's Vizard software. In October 2015 Sensics and SMI released an open-source plug-in that connected the DK2 upgrade to the OSVR software platform. The release said the plug-in streamed gaze direction and eye images through OSVR, made the data available to Unity and Unreal Engine, and supported SMI's calibration-free user mode and automatic slippage compensation.

Before CES 2016, SMI's OEM director Christian Villwock told UploadVR that the company had a 250 Hz eye tracking kit for head-mounted displays, developed in close collaboration with image sensor maker OmniVision, and that it planned to show foveated rendering at the show. On the performance gain from foveated rendering, he said "a factor of two to four is easily achievable right now". At the show SMI demonstrated eye tracking and foveated rendering on an Oculus Rift DK2 whose lens assembly it had replaced. Road to VR also tried a mobile prototype at CES, a Zeiss VR One with SMI's tracker fitted. The magazine noted higher eye tracking latency than on the PC version. SMI's Christian Villwock said the reference design it was launching at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which opened on 22 February 2016, was based on the Samsung Gear VR.

On 22 July 2016 SMI announced an eye tracking developer kit for the HTC Vive. It added small cameras and infrared light sources to the headset and came with a C# and C++ SDK and plug-ins for Unreal, Unity and Vizard. SMI listed foveated rendering, gaze interaction, personal display calibration, social presence and analytics as uses. The release also named a 2016 SDK for a modified Gear VR among the company's earlier VR kits. At SIGGRAPH 2016 in Anaheim, NVIDIA Research showed its perceptually based foveated rendering technique on an HTC Vive fitted with SMI eye tracking. SMI's release said NVIDIA chose its tracking for the 250 Hz sampling rate and low latency, and quoted NVIDIA vice president of research David Luebke: "The demonstration wouldn't be possible without our partners at SMI".

In February 2017 UploadVR reported that the eye tracking support in Qualcomm's VR 820 development kit came from a partnership with SMI, and that Qualcomm's HMD accelerator program, which helps headset makers build on the reference Snapdragon 835 VR headset (the Snapdragon 835 VR Development Kit), would offer SMI's eye tracking as a pre-optimized feature. At the Game Developers Conference that month, SMI and ARM showed a mobile foveated rendering demo on a Gear VR with a Samsung Galaxy S7 and SMI's retrofitted eye tracking. At the same show Valve and SMI both showed eye tracking HTC Vive headsets, part of joint research on adding eye tracking support to Valve's OpenVR API.

Acquisition by Apple

On 26 June 2017 MacRumors reported that Apple had acquired SMI. Road to VR summarized its evidence: according to MacRumors, SMI was acquired sometime between 2 May and 26 July 2017, and documents signed by Gene Levoff, Apple's vice president of corporate law, gave a German law firm power of attorney to handle the acquisition of SMI on behalf of Vineyard Capital Corporation. The documents were notarized in Cupertino, and MacRumors concluded that Vineyard Capital was a shell company used by Apple. Road to VR also noted that SMI's website had recently been stripped of its product information, contact details and management team. Apple did not discuss the deal's terms. Asked by TechCrunch, it said: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." The price was not disclosed.

Coverage at the time linked the purchase to Apple's interest in augmented and virtual reality. Earlier that month Apple had announced ARKit and SteamVR support for macOS.

After the acquisition

Road to VR reported in June 2017 that SMI's website had been stripped of all information about its product offerings. iMotions, a research software company whose platform supported SMI hardware, lists the SMI Eye Tracking Glasses 2 Wireless as discontinued and "no longer manufactured or sold", noting that SMI had been bought by Apple. In a blog post after the acquisition, iMotions founder and CEO Peter Hartzbech wrote that iMotions expected its own integration with SMI devices, such as the iView X RED models, to continue, but that support for existing SMI products would likely be discontinued after a while.

Products

Product	Type	Notes
RED250mobile	Remote (screen-based) eye tracker	Announced November 2014 with a 250 Hz sampling rate; aimed at studies outside the lab
REDn Scientific	Remote eye tracker	Announced November 2014 for fixation-based studies in schools, hospitals and kindergartens
iView X RED family	Remote eye trackers	Models listed by iMotions included the iView X RED (60 Hz) and the RED USB and RED M (60 Hz or 120 Hz)
Eye Tracking Glasses 2 Wireless (ETG 2w)	Head-worn eye tracker	60 Hz or 120 Hz sampling, 0.5 degree accuracy listed by iMotions; discontinued
Experiment Suite Scientific	Software	Research software supporting Visual Paired Comparison, Visual World and Preferential Looking paradigms
Eye tracking package for Oculus Rift DK2	VR eye tracking upgrade	Announced November 2014; SDK with Unity and Vizard support
Gear VR eye tracking reference design	VR eye tracking upgrade	Shown at Mobile World Congress 2016 with foveated rendering
HTC Vive eye tracking developer kit	VR eye tracking upgrade	Announced 22 July 2016; C# and C++ SDK with Unreal, Unity and Vizard plug-ins

XR work

SMI's VR products were retrofits and reference designs for existing headsets, not headsets of its own. The company sold them to developers and researchers and offered its tracking to headset makers through an OEM platform with reference designs for desktop, mobile, and augmented and virtual reality devices. Most of its public VR demonstrations centered on foveated rendering, in which a headset renders full detail only where the user is looking. In January 2016 Villwock told UploadVR that it was his personal belief that "all version two headsets will have eye tracking integrated".

See also

• Eye tracking
• Foveated rendering
• Tobii
• Eyefluence