Stereolabs debuted an AR ping pong demo at Augmented World Expo recently. Though we didn’t get the chance to try it, the creators sent us along a video showing the game being played in a pair of VR headsets with Stereolabs’ cameras showing each player an AR view of the world outside merged with a digital ping pong table.
We have previously tried out Stereolabs’ cameras with passthrough and they provide a pretty good view of the word around you even though you are wearing a VR headset. I’ve tried a couple pass-through AR solutions and, so far, Stereolabs is the most detailed solution I’ve seen.
The multiplayer AR demo is a tantalizing one in light of Google, Apple and others rolling out technology designed to let gadgets share their precise location with one another. The fact that you have to lock yourself off from other people in the same room while wearing a VR headset is one of the major reasons people decide not to wear one in the first place. Well-placed cameras for AR, however, could let players see through those lenses to the world beyond with digital objects inserted into view. Syncing up the location of those digital objects so that different players see the same mixed reality is an enormous technical achievement that will be key to the next generation of headsets. That’s what Stereolabs is previewing with its ping pong AR multiplayer demo.
The demo video below shows two people playing ping pong as naturally as they do in the real world, but the game is completely digital.
