We now live in a world where words like AR and VR have become mainstream. We now have technologies and hardware that will support AR and VR quite effortlessly. But we can’t neglect the fact that there is a clear line drawn between the two. But can be couple the two technologies to have the best of both worlds? With MIrrorworlds Concept, Leap Motion believes we can!
Keiichi Matsuda, Vice president of design at Leap Motion put it as “AR and VR are often presented to the public as separate, even competing for technologies. Ultimately though, devices will be able to span the entire continuum, from AR to VR and all of the rich shades of reality in between,”
The statement is in correlation with a series of videos put up by Leap Motion focusing on bridging the gap between the two called “Mirrorworlds.”
If you review the videos put up by Leap Motion, you can see that it toys with the notion of using AR and AR in the same platform. Till now, we had the technology to immerse ourselves in either VR or AR, but not both.
With the new technology proposed by Leap Motion, you can enjoy the freedom of movement and special awareness provided by AR with the limitless visual prowess of VR. In essence, this is the best of both worlds.
The blog explains the same as “You will be able to see and engage with other people in your environment, walk around, sit down on a chair. But you can also shoot fireballs, summon complex 3D models, or tear down your walls to look out on a Martian sunrise. Mirrorworlds re-contextualize your space. They change its meaning and purpose, integrating with our daily lives while radically increasing the possibilities for space.”
What makes all this possible? Real world Mapping is the answer. The hardware processes the surroundings in real time to add layers to textures and virtual gimmicks to make them stand out.
Till now, we have seen different companies pooling their efforts into VR and AR. However, they treated AR and VR as two separate fields. Quite interestingly, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are relatively new technologies, so many haven’t thought of the possibility of merging both to create something new.
If you think that this technology is years away from consumer use, then Masuda has a response that he shares as “It’s largely possible on today’s hardware, and now the limitations are less about technical constraints, and more in our ability to conceptualize, structure and prioritize the aspects of the world we want to build. That’s the brief we’ve been working on at Leap Motion Design Research. As we continue to build this framework, we’ll be exploring all facets of virtuality, from its materials to its grammar and spatial logic.”
Think of all the possibilities, games, interactive apps, the lot! Since a GTX 1060 can easily run all the modern VR titles at enjoyable frame rates, we can expect similar hardware to be capable of running Mirrorworlds applications without any hiccups.
We will have to wait a bit more to have a complete picture of how Mirrorworlds works and what it takes to run the apps. We can expect to see more companies follow in the footsteps of Leap Motion by combining AR and VR in the near future.
