Thursday, January 11, 2007

More on 3D Displays

Allen Varney wrote an article in this week's Escapist about 3D displays, and you can read it here.

In the article, he mentions the ARQuake Project, which was a fascinating bit of research conducted by the Wearable Computer Lab at the University of South Australia. Here's an excerpt from the game's website:
ARQuake is an Augmented Reality (AR) version of the popular Quake game. Augmented reality is the overlaying of computer generated information onto the real world. We use a head mounted display, mobile computer, head tracker, and GPS system to provide inputs to control the game. Using ARQuake, you can walk around in the real world and play Quake against virtual monsters.

Yes, that is entirely awesome.

The amazing bit is that they estimate that the hardware cost about $10,000US. That's a lot, but it's remarkably cheap for what it can do.

I said this a year ago or so, but I believe that the next big step in gaming will be 3D displays. The big step after that, though, will be 3D projections from the console itself, and we will interact with those projections.

Which will be the coolest moment of our lives, I imagine.

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