Google’s new video offered a mixed-reality style environment to bring digital and physical objects together.
Trixi Studios recently released a video that brought the new BB-8 Star Wars droid into a fun new augmented reality based environment in which digital objects were brought into the physical environment.
This experience was meant to provide Star Wars fans with a fun glimpse into what AR technology can do.
Despite the fact that Project Tango at Google and Hololens from Microsoft are both considered to be in the early phases of development, they are both working at full tilt to try to make the augmented reality experience more broadly available. Some of the recent releases have include the Hololens development kit from Microsoft that comes with a price tag of $3,000, while the development kit from Project Tango is a notably more affordable $512. The release of the Star Wars simulation was only one of a range of AR technology based teasers that have been released over YouTube in recent weeks.
There have also been several other players that have been strutting their augmented reality stuff.
Among them was the rather mysterious Magic Leap, which has been quite secretive about what it’s been up to. That said, it didn’t hold off releasing its own AR technology based video recently. With each new release, it becomes more clear that the tech has quite a bit to offer in terms of a unique and fascinating experience for users.
When it comes to the more recent Star Wars video, while the BB-8 droid was featured, it wasn’t the only character that made its way into the spotlight. In fact, there were several character interactions available as the creator of the video made it possible to provide digital representations of Boba Fett and Stormtroopers to be fought off.
While it is clear in the videos that the animations remain in earlier forms, the point wasn’t to show how accurate and detailed the animations could be. Instead, it was a fascinating demonstration of the type of features augmented reality could have to offer. The fact that top Star Wars characters were brought into the mix showed that there is some meaningful potential on the fun side of the spectrum.
Sony has been making some teasing remarks about this technology for its popular console.
The PlayStation Japan blog has just released an update that includes a number of videos that have revealed several different augmented reality experiments that the electronics giant has been conducting with its PlayStation 4 console and its camera device peripheral product.
The experiments include a number of different types of purposes for the AR technology.
For example, among the augmented reality experiments was one for fluid simulation, which was demonstrated in the video. It worked when the user held up a white card, which appeared on the display as a virtual cube that held water. That digital water could then be poured into a second container, which was also only virtually created. This illustrates a number of different challenging concepts that hold a considerable amount of potential to the console and mobile gaming worlds.
The videos went on to demonstrate the way that augmented reality can be used for a realistic experience.
For example, one of the videos showed AR dynamic lighting that was demonstrated through the PlayStation 4. In this video, the user had a light source in real life, which appeared to illuminate a dinosaur that was appearing virtually. This technology was not just for light, but also a range of different colors.
The PlayStation Japan also went on to discuss the “trading card recognition” work that Sony has been pursuing. This AR recognition tech demonstration uses AR in order to be able to recognize a trading card’s pattern in high speed and to then be able to display the character and play music related to that character, nearly immediately. That specific function was not demonstrated within the videos in the blog post.
The blog also underscored different two augmented reality demos that used the PlayStation Vita. The first was a demonstration of a diorama of the Narita Airport. It used an actual flight schedule from that airport and gave users the chance to see virtual planes that were taking off and landing as viewed through the PS Vita when aimed at the diorama. The second demo involved the so-called “VitaHoloPoP”, which is a “Super Cyber transmission box” that would use the PS Vita to project virtual images of various character figurines in a hologram-like way, into a display case in real life.
