Patent attributes
The technology described herein generically calibrates the eye tracking apparatus in a head-mounted display (HMD) device making user-specific calibration unnecessary. The eye tracking apparatus uses one or more cameras to view the eyes of the user wearing the HMD device. From the images captured of the user's eyes, the generically calibrated HMD is able to determine a gaze direction for the user without the user needing to perform a user-specific calibration. The present technology bypasses the need for understanding user specific eye characteristics, such the shape of pupil and iris (ellipticity), by training a machine learning model on a large number of diverse eye images taken in diverse conditions. The machine learning model may take on the form of a convolutional neural network or some other regression based machine learning technology.