Watch what castAR's projected augmented reality can do
In November last year, former Valve engineer Jeri Ellsworth and her team over at Technical Illusions finally shipped their first ever castAR headset -- a pair of projected augmented reality glasses that the crew have been working on for almost two years. Thanks to a highly successful Kickstarter campaign (it raised over $1 million) and funding from investors, the team have also now moved to Silicon Valley to further the development of the hardware. As far as they've come however, the technology behind castAR is still rather hard to describe -- it's not virtual reality like the Oculus Rift, and it's not "normal" augmented reality like Google Glass (though castAR does sell optional clip-ons that'll change it into a VR or normal AR headset if you like). Thankfully, the Technical Illusions folks have just rolled out a new video that shows off what exactly castAR can do.
As a brief reminder, castAR consists of a pair of polarized glasses that have built-in projectors and a camera plus a retroreflective surface embedded with infrared LEDs. The projectors cast a three-dimensional image onto the surface, while the camera uses the LEDs to track your head movement. As you can see in the video demo here, castAR claims that you can use this unique projected augmented reality technology to do things like view building projects in 3D, play interactive video games and create three-dimensional presentations -- assuming, of course, that you can blanket various surfaces in your house with the retroreflective material. It's a fascinating look into what's possible with the technology, and could be an indicator of castAR's future. After all, GDC is right around the corner.
