CastAR use a M3 reflective material and pico projector 3D glasses to bring 3D board games alive.
Hololens sounds amazing but I get the idea that it’s going to be expensive.
CastAR sound like they are going to plug into the power of people’s mobile devices and PC’s.
After all what fun would a boardgame be with only one player.
CastAR grew from a Steam R&D effort into AR/VR via a Kickstarter then went silent when venture capital turned up the funding. Things are quite on the CastAR new’s front and have been for about a year now.
More recent interviews indicate they may be looking into an all in one CastAR solution, so the board may be the computer/gaming console, in which case $400 sounds about right for a gaming console and glasses.
Finally, not a “clickbaity buzzfeed headline” topic.
Their website is bare bones and doesn’t offer much information.
The idea seems interesting, but I think there will be couple of issues here. As far as I know, projecting stuff onto flat surface will not offer a view identical to a hologram, plus I’m not sure how they’re supposed to have more than one person viewing the table. It seems to be very similar to ““3d” tv” glasses.
I think that some sort of volumetric display could be much more suitable for this kind of tech.
The reflective surface is the same 3M material used for high visibility jackets, it’s designed to reflect light back towards the source. This feature allows each pair of glasses to project onto and have reflected back their own “3D view”, as each lens in the glasses has it’s own pico projector.
I’ve seen better holodeck style systems that use high speed projectors to project a 3d image onto a spinning display surfaces (the surfaces need to spin at high speeds so tend to need a vacuum chamber).
The problem with this style of display is that it would need to render hundreds of image slices to cover the visible range of the image.
Or your projected onto air display would need to display millions of ‘air-pixels’ per frame with at least three coloured lasers to present a textured RGB image.
i saw the Build 2016 conference talking about how to dev for Hololens,
they said there is no local file system shown to the user, its all handled by OneDrive ??
= instant “NOPE! NOT INTERESTED!”
meta glasses look better… but yeah i really havent cared to become insanely interested in it as I should
and hololens I guess only has like 4 hand gestures?? and you gotta aim with your head to aim the pointer??? = LAME!!
i guess metaglasses can scan your hand and its like a 3d mesh interacting with the other meshes??
… hmmmm, though I guess unlike Hololens, metaglasses require a PC ??? that suuckss…
Yes, but the one @neginfinity is referring to isn’t restricting to a spinning surface. It’s like the difference between a projector and a monitor except that the monitor in this case will be a very bulky object.
You’re not thinking about it’s problems, how can light and air occlude. How can you do anything more than vector graphics. As soon as you fill in a plane or texture on one side the light would show up all the way around.
Simple example take a model in Unity put it in a black scene, use a transparent shader with emission.
The top cube is the kind of visuals a holographic system would have, if it does not have a technique to occlude or only display what the user can see, and tried to fill the graphics.
Even to play a fun 3D vector wire-frame game it would need to omit/occlude/limit what it draws.
Yeah, CastAR is cool, I’m still curious what it is going to be when it finally comes out - how they will market it and how polished it will be.
I think the local multiplayer ability is one of it’s strongest points.
I have read a few articles and one of the later one mentioned that they were looking to move away from a PC tethered platform.
Which I can understand as they do seem to be aiming for the tabletop gaming market.
Not sure how that would work though:
Game console, maybe built into the game board, and you just plug the glasses in.
Mobile phone/device powered glasses with a game board console hub.
Wireless smart glasses and game hub, which would probably be the ideal if it’s possible.
PC or Console based with the board and glasses as peripherals (who knows?).
And if you look at how cheap and powerful mobile chips are getting they could probably set up a dedicated hardware/console system and portal Ouya style but with a definitive niche in board style games.
