I’m aiming a gun at balloons floating through a room. Zap. Zap. Zap. Pop. Pop. Pop. My head is stuck in a VR headset, but my hands aren’t using a video game controller, or even one of those fancy motion remotes from HTC or Oculus.
I’m holding a piece of paper that’s accurately dubbed a PaperStick. When I’d printed it out five minutes ago and and folded it up like a triangular tube, I honestly felt pretty silly. Here I was, a grown man, finding a USB cable, digging around for paper, making sure my inkjet still had ink left, all to print myself a piece a toy laser gun that, itself, resembled some cheap advertising that might be slipped below my car’s windshield:
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Looked like a blast.
Then I slipped on my Google Cardboard headset, loaded the $2 Poppist VR Android app developed for the experience, and held the PaperStick where the phone’s camera would see it. Suddenly it transformed in my field of view into a digital weapon. I could tilt and aim the gun as if it were a real object. And pressing my thumb against the “AT” button pulled the trigger. Pop. Pop. Pop. Those balloons were dead.
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But that shouldn’t make the deeper concept of PaperStick any less promising. High-end VR experiences can place virtual paintbrushes and bow and arrows into your fingers in a pretty convincing way—but these cost thousands of dollars and require custom hardware to get running. PaperStick demonstrates that technologies like those cheap old QR codes that were good for nothing but silly promotions might soon serve a real purpose—to create dazzling new interfaces in our hands and before our eyes for nothing more expensive than a little bit of ink.
Source: Fastcodesign