Motorcycle helmets are definitely going high-tech in an effort to improve safety and offer riders more connectivity when cruising down the highway. A company called Skully Helmets has unveiled the latest high-tech helmet called the Skully P1 and it’s very impressive. One of the key features of the helmet is an integrated rearview camera. That […]
With gadgets like the Oculus Rift and Google Glass, it’s looking like the future of displays is going to be a war for space on our faces. Here’s one more promising invention that may make you wish you had several pairs of eyes and foreheads. castAR glasses can not only beam stereographic 3D to your eyes a la Oculus Rift, they can also project 3D video to the real world.
castAR is the invention of Technical Illusions, a company setup by former Valve employees Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson. The two are videogame industry veterans with decades of software and hardware expertise between them. Their device can display hologram-like videos and images in 3D using two micro-projectors and a retro-reflective sheet.
Aside from acting as a display, the sheet is also required for motion tracking. A camera in the middle of the glasses tracks infrared markers on the sheet to deduce the wearer’s head position and orientation. The wearer’s perspective is properly adjusted as he moves around the sheet, as if you were looking at a physical object from different angles.
The wand shown several times in the video is a controller designed to work with the glasses. It has buttons, a trigger and a joystick, and it can also track its own position. As you saw in the video the controller is used to interact with the projected images, increasing the illusion that there really is something in front of you.
What I find most exciting are the RFID add-ons. You can get an RFID tracking grid that can track RFID tags. The tags can do anything from summoning a figurine into the game – similar to Skylanders – or displaying stats. But there’s also an add-on with called an RFID Base. The base is essentially a tiny computer that can control other hardware. For example, as Technical Illusions mentions in its Kickstarter page, you could have an RFID Base with red LEDs and a tiny smoke machine. Stick a dragon figurine on top of that base and your game can trigger the base to become a glowing, smoke-belching monster. If that doesn’t make you support castAR I don’t know what will.
Pledge at least $189 (USD) on Kickstarter to get the castAR glasses plus the retro-reflective sheet.
[via Reddit]
There’s a team of creators out in the wild this week showing off a pair of augmented reality / virtual reality glasses called castAR, a pair of glasses that’s set to make Star Wars a reality. The inspiration for this wearable piece of technology comes directly from the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope, […]
Samsung will launch a Google Glass rival, currently dubbed the Galaxy Gear Glass, sometime in Q2 2014 an insider claims, supposedly expanding its wearable family with a head-worn computer. The work-in-progress gadget is expected to arrive in April or May next year, according to Eldar Murtazin, following up the Galaxy Gear smartwatch which Samsung launched […]
For a while, novelty celebrity voiceovers
     |
We’ve seen an iOS app that can translate text from one language to another in real-time. The engineers at Japanese telecommunications company NTT DoCoMo thought it would be easier for users if the translator was integrated into a pair of glasses. If I had these the first thing I’d do would be to use it to play all the Super Robot Wars games. Damn you Banprestoooo!
Similar to the voice translator Sigmo, NTT DoCoMo’s prototype needs an Internet connection to be able to translate text. It will then display the translation over the Japanese characters.
2020? There’ll be a billion SRW games by then!
[via Reuters via UniqueDaily]
Grand Theft Auto and Glass may be more commonly about the broken variety than Google’s wearable, but that hasn’t stopped one developer from cooking up some head-up map integration between the game and the headset. Mike DiGiovanni‘s realtime GPS for Grand Theft Auto 3 on Glass may only work with the third installment of the […]
Reevu has come up with what they call a commercially viable and fully functioning Intelligent Helmet, touted to be the first of its kind in the world to feature an internal augmented reality display that are well within the internationally accepted standards envelope. In fact, the folks over at Reevu are pretty stoked that this Intelligent Helmet will be different from majority of the proposed augmented reality systems that have made its way to the Internet, as this particular development will make the jump from the drawing board to our reality.
Just how did Reevu do this? Well, they do have the advantage of development engineers working on such a helmet, drawing from their technical know-how as well as using internationally registered patents in order to develop this internally housed augmented reality helmet device. Compact in form factor, the Multiple Reflective Optical Systems (or M.R.OP.S for short) is also one of the inventions that makes this fully functioning helmet possible, allowing it to deliver information without any kind of eye strain or unnecessary distraction to the wearer. Not only that, it has been touted that this particular invention is able to be integrated so that it can accept a range of current diagnostic and information enabling systems which are linked to the cluster pack of some of the latest bike designs at the moment.
Markus S., the engineering team leader, shared, “We are primarily developing the product to fit within Reevu’s product portfolio in the motorsports sector however further products are on the drawing board utilizing the invention.”
Unfortunately, we do not happen to have any details concerning the pricing as well as availability of the Reevu Intelligent Helmet with built-in augmented reality, but it would certainly be cool if they could divulge more information on it. Do expect augmented reality Heads Up Display units to catch on in popularity down the road, considering how even vehicles are moving in such a direction these days.
Press Release
[ Reevu Intelligent Helmet Has Internal Augmented Reality Display copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
This year we’ve heard more than a couple whispers – and straight up confirmations – from and about Nokia’s wearable device prospects. Today we’re seeing a couple of views of a device that may well bring the company in to the smartwatch universe. This miniature watch-face-sized piece of equipment has appeared overseas in what we […]
Google has thrown open Glass to third-party applications, though the wearable still does not support native code from other developers. The newly opened Glassware Review Process is now accepting submissions from any coder, with the promise of more Mirror API quota – the controlled pipe through which cloud-based Glass apps communicate with the headset itself […]
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
