Reminiscent of the beginnings of the Oculus Rift, there’s now a new Augmented Reality headwear coming to Kickstarter from some old Valve employees and Jeri Ellsworth. They had some rough prototypes at the recent Maker Faire 2013, and the folks from engadget were there to get pics and an interview.
We interacted with a variety of environments, from a flying tour over a digital landscape to shooting up zombies with hooked up Xbox controllers, and was amazed at how intuitive and natural the controls felt. We also waved a LED-equipped wand around to throw a wrecking ball into a Jenga-style tower, which delighted us to no end. Not once did we feel nauseous or disoriented even as we bobbed and weaved.
Different from many other AR systems I’ve seen, the Cast works by mounting the projectors on your head thanks to new picoprojector technology. This offers many benefits like the ability to tightly couple a projector’s display to shutter glasses in hardware, allowing the projectors to display the left and right eye-frames in sync with active shutter glasses. This limits the augmented reality experience to a small projection area, but you could imagine a modified AR/VR scenario similar to working in a CAVE where you only render the portion of the screen you are looking at.
via Cast AR hands-on with Jeri Ellsworth at Maker Faire 2013 (update: video interview).
Looks ok, nothing close to the awesomeness of the oculus rift though.