The Physical and Virtual Worlds Aren't Going to Stay Separate for Long

Remember all the buzz around Second Life back in the early 2000s? I remember thinking, this is the future. But it never really took off, and since then I've been surprised at how long it's taking to meld the physical and virtual worlds in people's everyday lives.

Hence my interest was piqued when I read about castAR—an augmented reality device you may have heard about for exploding on Kickstarter over the past month, ending its campaign with over a million dollars raised. At first blush it looks like another gadget riding the coattails of digital-reality blurring tech like the Oculus Rift and Google Glass. But the technology beyond the new device has very interesting applications outside the gaming and gear head niches. Might it be the overdue mainstreaming of the virtual world?

A quick rundown of the castAR technology: It’s a pair of glasses a bit bulkier than your average pair of shades, which project 3D, digital holographic images that blend realistically and accurately with the physical world around you. The project’s creators, Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson, both well-known in their fields, compare the effect to the scene in the original Star Wars where R2-D2 and Chewbacca play holographic 3D chess.

In other words, you can play a game where half the characters and environment are virtual projections and half are real-world things—and as you move your head around to change angles and perspectives, the device corrects the augmented visuals to adapt to the physical environment around you. You can also toggle the castAR program to display a fully immersive virtual reality, along the lines of the Rift.

The castAR ships out in September at $180 a pop. Here’s how it works: The glasses are fitted with a mini-projector fixed above each lens and a tiny camera in the middle. The surface, which you can roll out on the floor, or a table (and eventually a whole room, Ellsworth says), has RFID coils sitting underneath it that allow the camera to scan and track your head position, so the hologram being projected to your eyes makes sense with the physical world you’re looking at.

As you move around, duck down, get closer, look at the projected display from different angles, it adjusts to continually meld with your physical reality. And the digital world can be accessed remotely, so a friend or coworker miles away can see the same virtual display and the physical objects and movements happening at your end.

There’s a certain wow factor to the whole thing, as well as other emerging virtual display technologies that are bridging the gap between the virtual and physical worlds. But in the future, I'm willing to bet that mixing the two realms will be commonplace.

I'm not much of a gamer, so I was interested to chat with Ellsworth and Johnson about the device's applications for the rest of us. In a phone interview they told me they're speaking to interested companies in the manufacturing, film, and medical industries about the technology. One selling point for all the industries is that the program makes augmenting reality a social and collaborative experience.

Picture these scenarios: Geological charts of the Earth that show mineral deposits and the like are now viewed as a flat map full of squiggly lines. But a team of scientists wearing the castAR glasses can make that data 3D, so as to see the depth of the terrain, etc, and poke around the simulated Earth. Or, movie producers could use it to get a more realistic idea of how actors would interact with 3D animated characters like monsters or what not. Architects, instead of rolling out a flat paper blueprint, could display virtual 3D models of structures that clients can walk through and visualize.

"It's sort of like taking data in a spreadsheet and having it plotted out onto a graph, but this is now a three-dimensional graph, so to speak," Johnson said.

Companies have expressed interested in the technology for professional flight simulators: A pilot wearing the glasses can still see their hands as they touch and move a digitally simulated control stick, or project a virtual immersion of what they're flying through.

And of course, gaming. The creators hope the technology can make video games and computer games more social, and also bring old-school board games into the digital age. Take a game of Monopoly. You could 3D project, say, the board and the houses, while you move the little metal iron around the board. Then your friend playing on the other side of the country can see the same projected display, only your physical pieces show up as virtual objects as you move them, so you both have the same visual experience.

Ellsworth said this is the kind of thing that could help make augmented reality widely adopted—finally. "My gut feel is that augmented reality is going to be a very mainstream space," she said. "I can see my father playing an augmented reality game—playing cards with his friends across the country. I don't see my father playing with virtual reality, totally immersed."

The key to drumming up interest in playing around in virtual environments is to make the gear itself so user-friendly you don't think about it, said Ellsworth. So it's "more about the game, less about the hardware."