What’s the next technological innovation set for the near future? Virtual reality seems to be next up on the list. And, various manufacturers are already researching and developing such technologies.
Technology that merges digital realities with real-time reality, that is. Augmented reality is the current tech that’s evolved out of a desire to implement virtual reality. In fact, it’s always been evolving alongside virtual reality itself.
Augmented reality, however, integrates digital information with live video or real time environments. Virtual reality, although related, more or less replaces the real world with a virtual one.
Designing augmented reality – Meta Pro smart glasses
The premise of augmented reality lets people design their reality—if they want to make something happen, such technology will help them. Imagine entire networks being controlled with the use of an augmented reality device. Well, that’s something that tech company Meta wants to make happen.
The Meta Pro is the tech company’s first foray into augmented reality, a AR device designed to mimic an experience likened to that of Iron Man using his own AR-like tech, J.A.R.V.I.S., in the eponymous films.
The company’s current efforts produced a device that holds an entire augmented reality computing system in a glasses chassis, making the device wearable. So far, the glasses are set to be debuted by next year, already having been placed up for preorder earlier in 2014. Developers have already gotten their hands on the initial Meta Pro prototypes, and the reaction has been positive so far.
The main technologies that have set differentiated Meta’s device from others is their hand tracking and surface tracking algorithms. The algorithms are based upon the work of their chief scientist, the father of wearable computing, Steve Mann. The algorithms are pretty essential: they’re what help enable their unique, quality holographic computing conceptions, exactly as they desire them to be.
It’s working, too. Meta Pro now tracks and identifies wall and table surfaces even if the glasses can’t see them in its field of view. It’s a far cry from its initial surface tracking, which only was able to see the edges of its field of view in order to create a virtual display.
The breakthrough’s attributed to the tech’s incorporation of information gathered by the glasses’ newly implemented 9-axis inertial measurement unit.
So, while we’re decades off developing a true virtual world (that isn’t just a video game), Meta’s shown that augmented reality has taken quite a few evolutionary steps. Smart devices like tablets have helped people learn how useful augmented reality can be.
Now, smart glasses are next up in helping mature augmented reality into a viable technology.
