Wearable Tech: ViewAR Augmented Reality
Today we’re at the Wearable Tech Conference in London. Ever played with the Nintendo 3DS’s augmented reality toys? ViewAR takes the idea a step further – and showed us what their tech can do.
Here’s a video of CEO Markus Meixner demonstrating the technology to me using an iPad and simply a print out of the floorplan. What was particularly cool about this was how smoothly the image ran – it “felt” fairly solid as the iPad moved around the sheet of paper. Seeing the parallax as the camera zooms over, exposing different parts of the room was particularly impressive.
Now, you may be wondering how on earth this counts as a “Wearable”. Later in the video Markus also demonstrates how his technology works in combination with a headset, in which you can mount your phone. They don’t make the headset, but it further enhances the augmented reality technology – and will apparently behaving a similar way to the Oculus Rift – albeit at 5% of the price, because your phone provides the screen. According to Markus, your phone is also better suited to the task than the Oculus, because it has more powerful on board processing of images.
Whilst aimed at business at the moment, don’t be surprised if this technology starts seeing its way into other company’s apps. Augmented reality is only just getting started – as we only saw with Rescape yesterday.
