I was very impressed with Steve Mann's keynote, history as the father of wearable computing, and his work with Meta as Chief Scientist. I tried out Meta's glasses and was impressed with how I could reach out and grab 'virtual' objects and bring them closer to me.
The Meta team was inspired by the interfaces in films like Iron Man, Avatar and Minority Report and wanted to make them a reality. Their Kickstarter meta 1 Developer Kit has the power to deliver a natural interface between the virtual world and reality.
Tech Specs include:
Hardware:
Field of view: 23 degrees for each eye, in the centre of the field of vision. Appears five metres away from the viewer before stereoscopic effects are applied which allows perceived distance to vary.
Projection: two individual screens, one for each eye, appear in front of the user, so as to render in stereo.
Resolution: 960x540 for each eye
Weight: 0.3 kilograms
Supported Platforms: Currently Windows 32bit/64bit. Support for other platforms is in development.
Inputs: HDMI/USB
Software:
Develop Using: Write code in Unity3D on a Windows PC. Other platforms will follow.
SDK provides: Gestures and Finger tracking, general depth data that works with any objects in range of the depth camera, RGB data and surface tracking (access planes and meshes of surfaces in the real world, so you can anchor virtual objects to them, or augment them in other ways.)
Here are the short videos I took at Augmented World Expo.
Hydraulophone Demo
Daqri Chemistry Demo
Daqri Anatomy Video
Daqri Railroad Demo
