You may soon be able to get your hands on a pair of affordable augmented reality glasses.
Hand-tracking company Leap Motion has unveiled ‘Project North Star’, a prototype headset that superimposes computer-generated images onto the world around you.
The futuristic AR headset places two high quality, albeit somewhat gigantic, screens in front of the user’s eyes, enabling them to see virtual graphics in real life.
North Star can also track gestures, turning your hand into a ‘virtual wearable’.
The AR system is outfitted with two 1600×1400 translucent LCD displays that run at a quick 120 frames per second, creating a 100-degree field of view and a hand-tracking sensor that creates a 180-degree field of view.
Despite the device’s tantalizingly cheap starting price, you can’t buy the North Star headset just yet.
Leap Motion said the headset is just a prototype design, but the firm is opening the hardware and software up to developers next week.
The hope is that by making North Star open source, savvy developers can experiment with the technology and, potentially, build it at scale for less than $100.
‘Although this is an experimental platform right now, we expect that the design itself will spawn further endeavors that will become available for the rest of the world,’ Leap Motion co-founder and CTO David Holz wrote in a blog post.
‘To this end, next week we will make the hardware and related software open source’
‘The discoveries from these early endeavors should be available and accessible to everyone,’ he added.
Leap Motion created a computer model to show what the headset might look like. The firm said they designed it to work with 5.5-inch smartphone displays
The glasses are also equipped with Leap Motion’s advanced gesture tracking technology that let you grab and touch virtual objects with your hands and without any controllers, wands or other devices.
Keiichi Matsuda, Leap Motion’s creative director and VP of design, has been showing off the North Star’s tracking capabilities on Twitter.
In a series of videos, Matsuda shows off how the North Star headset can turn your hand into a ‘virtual wearable’.
Matsuda flips over his hand, which triggers a virtual menu to sprout out of his palm.
It’s unclear what these tabs would enable the user to do, but the headset seems capable of reacting quickly and seamlessly to the user’s movements.
Another video shows Matsuda holding a colorful virtual cube and passing his hand through it.
In a series of videos, Matsuda shows off how the North Star headset can turn your hand into a ‘virtual wearable’. He flips his palm over to display a virtual menu with tabs that user can touch
In a blog post about the device, Holz discussed how he believes we are at a tipping point when it comes to augmented reality going mainstream.
However, while many tech firms are exploring AR via glasses and other wearables, cost seems to be the biggest barrier.
The North Star headset appears strikingly similar to Microsoft’s HoloLens, which currently costs $5,000.
Similarly, secretive startup Magic Leap has been developing a pair of mixed reality glasses over several years that start at $1,000.
Magic Leap has said that consumers should expect the price of the device to be similar to the cost of Apple’s top-of-the-line iPhone X.
HOW DO MAGIC LEAP’S LIGHTWEAR AUGMENTED REALITY HEADSETS WORK?
Magic Leap’s first device, Magic Leap One (Creator’s Edition), contains three components.
These are the Lightwear glasses, the Lightpack computing platform, and the Control handheld controller.
The Lightwear goggles use Digital Lightfield technology, which generates digital light at different depths.
This blends with natural light to produce more lifelike objects over real world settings.
The Lightpack, the firm explains, is the ‘engine’ behind the spatial computing platform, with high-powered processing and graphics in a small, portable design.
And, the handheld controller will give users force control and haptic feedback, and allow for six degrees of freedom.
But Leap Motion is taking a different approach, by attempting to put high quality AR technology in a cheap body.
The firm says it was able to create a system with ‘the technical specifications of a pair of augmented glasses of the future’ all while keeping the headset ‘under one hundred dollars to produce at scale’.
It remains to be seen whether or not the North Star headset will ever come to fruition, however.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5596497/Would-wear-Leap-Motion-unveils-Project-North-Star-AR-headset-costs-100.html#ixzz5CMeUuVeX
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Another stupid toy for $1000 that cold be better spent elsewhere, but there are enough idiots out there who simply must own the latest gadget, regardless of what it costs, or how useless it is.
What they’re not telling you is that it also tracks your every movement, reads your mind, sends all your thoughts to the NSA, and causes blindness, cancer, and impotence.
100 not 1000 open source means that the code is openly available as is the hardware and you can know everything that’s going on with those sensors it’s for developers for people like myself they want to create augmented reality projects. Not everything has to be game based.