Amazing AR Inventions at CES Friday
The home stretch for my daily CES coverage of AR & VR.
Returning to my shabby Rio hotel room late Friday night I am filled with gratitude. To my friend Bob Fine, Publisher and Editor of the VR Voice, who dragged me out to Vegas to ply my new trade as a writer and industry analyst, to the exhibitors on the floor who were so generous with their time and patient with my questions, and especially to the enthusiastic people who came to hear me speak at the the VR Voice demo event and hung out afterward. We ended up at the shabby Stratosphere lobby bar, maybe the least crowded in Vegas, where people could actually talk. They were curious, ambitious, idealistic, respectful and thoughtful.
It may be lonely inside of Virtual Reality today, but outside there is a genuine community of people who share the belief that this technology can change the world.
Project T — A Revolutionary Take on AR from Sony Future Labs
Tucked humbly in the back of the VR/AR Marketplace in the South Hall, far from the teeming madness of Sony’s mega presence half a mile away, was Sony’s RD arm, Future Lab, which productizes new technology and evangelizes its uses to partners and, here at CES, the public. Project T is a Concept Prototype that creates interactive space on a table and the surfaces of real objects under a depth sensing projector which enables users to intuitively and naturally manipulate images and information projected onto the space.
Combining real and virtual images on a table top, Tored Sangberg of Sony demonstrated how a building could be constructed with blocks, and rooms projected onto those blocks. Using natural hand gestures, rooms can be rearranged and resized. The hand can stand in for the sun and waved around the mixed reality building design to show how the light and shadows look inside and outside the building.
The most amazing Project T demo was based on the characters in an old black and white illustrated copy of “Alice in Wonderland”. Drag the black and white illustration out of a book, color and animate it.
Project T may be the closest thing to pure magic I’ve seen at at CES 2017.
Occipital is Quietly Changing the World
I finally got a few minutes with Founder & CEO of Occipital, Jeff Powers, and met the Bridge AR pet robot, Bridget, in person. You do not need to be wearing a VR headset to enjoy Bridget. The AR critter works just as well on an iPad equipped with Occipital’s Structure, a forward facing multipont camera that maps the real world in 3D and allows Bridget to navigate around. It’s commercial application architecture and design, as the data it captures can be imported into Autocad. “AR may be the gateway to VR,” he told me. On the surface, the business of Occipital, creating hardware for enterprises seems rather mundane, but Powers told me developers are readying more entertainment applications for the March release of its next version of the Bridge VR/AR headset.
Snapdragon and Tango Are Going to Make Mobile VR Special
Qualcomm has created a new class of super fast processors for mobile devices called Snapdragon. Running Google’s advanced mobile AR platform, Tango, on a Lenovo Phab2, the phone generated 3D quality depth and seamlessly allowed objects to be placed into the real world and scaled by hand. It will map and measure environments, and then allow you to literally re-arrange the furniture.
One Wild Day Full of Promise
This post needed to be short as I am now short of sleep and short of time. Only 8 hours left on the show floor, I’ve got a lot of ground to cover. With half of the show cross town from the convention center at the Venetian and Sands expo center, and the Aria hotel. I’m hoping to hit the University Research center, Samsung and Microsoft, key players in the future of AR/VR.
The World of AR Marches on Outside CES
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