©Nick Statt / The Verge
A closer and more realized AR alternative to smart glasses
Sony has made it a point to come to SXSW, the annual Austin-based tech and culture meet-up, every year with a warehouse full of weird gadgets, demos, games, and other interactive experiences. This year was no different, as Sony opened the doors yesterday on the Wow Factory, its name for the wide-ranging exhibit that blends art and technology borne from its experimental, Japan-based Future Lab program. The experiences in the Wow Factory tend to center on Sony’s display tech, specifically its advances in projectors that ultimately seem to have manifested as a pricey consumer product called the Xperia Touch.
But Sony hasn’t stopped pushing the limits of the tech. The core premise is that with a mix of smart sensors that perform depth detection and motion tracking with a high-quality light source, you can create the closest thing we have today to interactive holograms. The projectors create objects out of light that typically exist on a flat plane either in front of the projector or below on a tabletop. You can interact with these virtual objects using your hands because the projector’s software is able to recognize and track your movements. Effectively, Sony has figured out a way to make augmented reality without requiring you wear bulky goggles or goofy smart glasses.
Going one step further, Sony has designed custom demos that make use of real-world objects. Sony returned to Austin this year with a collaborate music game that combines four of its projectors into a single cohesive system. With small 3D models of instruments, including a miniature saxophone and a piano, users can work together to play a series of songs by directing spotlights to each instrument. The small 3D-printed models are recognized by the software and come to life under the projectors’ light, while other sensors track your finger motions as you move the spotlight around the table.
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Source: The Verge