We’ve seen a lot of funny and intriguing concepts for projects from Daniel Beauchamp, aka @pushmatrix on Twitter, but his latest reimagines for AR something that’s become an icon of VR design.
The idea sees blue and red lightsabers coming out of the ends of fingers for a tabletop miniature version of Beat Saber. He tweeted three videos showing different aspects of the idea which he designed with a 3D model of an airplane seat and populated with Beat Saber cubes. He put it all together in Unity with some visual effects to bring home the idea.
In other words, this isn’t a real game (you won’t get the kind of dexterity and low latency required to pull this off out of the current Oculus Quest’s hand tracking) but the concept is nonetheless an intriguing depiction of a VR classic adapted to augmented reality.
Check it out here:
Beauchamp runs the AR/VR efforts at Shopify and over the last several months tweeted various videos he made — most of which have gone viral — depicting various concepts with the Oculus Quest hand tracking system. You can also grab Hand Space on Sidequest if you have a Quest and want to test out a couple of the experiments yourself.
I asked Beauchamp over direct message about what he wanted to explore with this latest experiment. He explained:
“I think a lot about how AR / VR headsets will be worn in public, and what types of games we’ll play on the go. You’re obviously not going to be standing up thrashing about in Beat Saber while on a train. This exploration was made to see if hand tracking + AR headsets could open up a new type of gaming. Could we port some of our favorite titles from VR into small, more discreet playspaces? Plus I wanted to feel what it would be like to have lightsaber fingers.”
