As attendees of Inside 3D Printing come away from the Virtual Reality Summit, they will, hopefully, also come away with a new found appreciation of VR, AR, and mixed reality. With Microsoft’s HoloLens on its way to developers starting next year, this product may be the most fully realized mixed reality device to date. Necessarily, the wave of mixed reality devices to emerge will incorporate multiple users, or the solipsism of virtual experiences will be too much to bear. Plus, what’s the use of augmenting reality with a headset if you can’t hallucinate the same things as your friends and co-workers? To tackle the issue of multiple users of mixed reality, Microsoft researcher, and mixed reality pioneer, Jaron Lanier is working a project he calls Comradre (pronounced “comradery”), according to the Technology Review.
Unveiled at SIGGRAPH 2015, Comradre uses smartphones, laptops, and a number of sensors to track head movements. The “Reality Masher” headset, the primary product being designed under project Comradre, has a field of view (FoV) of greater than 60 degrees in all directions and allows for collaboration between wearers. Some applications being explored by Lanier’s team of interns and students include educational toys for children, visualizing math equations, visualizing sound, and, even playing virtual instruments.
Microsoft says that the work being performed is unrelated to the HoloLens, but the similarities are hard not to discuss. The footage of the Reality Masher, captured by one of the headsets, bares a resemblance to the Project X-Ray game unveiled by Microsoft recently, a demo that will be shipped with the device in Q1 2016.
As I learned from the VR Summit at Inside 3D Printing, the augmented reality market is supposed to reach ten times that of the VR market in just five years, with revenues in the tens of billions of dollars. More importantly than the money that it will bring is the fact that mixed reality devices, like the HoloLens and Reality Masher, will allow for us to interact with digital objects like never before. As 3D scanning transfers physical objects into the digital world, 3D printers will spit them back out again. We’re still in early stages yet, but that impending future will really begin to take shape starting next year, as a number of headsets finally make their way onto the world’s stage.
All images via MIT Technology Review, unless otherwise stated.
