The Augmented World Expo: Go XR or Become Extinct

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes

My next visit was in the startup pavilion with Kaaya Tech, who were introducing the Holo Suit, a wearable that includes various haptics. Haptics is “the study or use of tactile sensations and the sense of touch as a method of interacting with computers and electronic devices. Haptics allows you to feel and manipulate digitized objects in a virtual 3D environment ^[3].” Most XR devices use individual haptic sensors such as handheld controllers to enable you to interact with the virtual world. The Holo Suit takes full body motion capture beyond gaming and into the real world—an ideal solution for various applications in sports, healthcare, education, entertainment or industrial operations. The lightweight four-piece suit consists of a jacket, pants and two gloves and it can be purchased as separate items or as a complete suit. The complete suit features up to 36 body motion sensors—along with nine integrated haptic exciters to provide precise physical feedback to the user. This suit connects to your device (PC, smartphone, or other XR hardware such as the HTC Vive or the Hololens, etc.) wirelessly over Bluetooth or WiFi, etc. Presently, this haptic suit can be found here on Kickstarter.

I was able to see numerous new headsets and smart glasses. One such device was by VisionAR, (Univer Optical Technologies), lightweight and good quality smart glasses that let the user keep his or her own glasses on if needed and superimpose a virtual world over the real world. The interesting feature that got my attention was that they are wired using a thin, non-annoying cable to a box you wear on your belt or in a pocket. The smallish box provides long battery life and the wireless connection to your computer, phone, etc. This eliminates the issue of RF radiation against your head. There are also shielded pocket protectors and even shielded underwear available to keep the RF away from your body while allowing it to connect through the side away from your person. 615 Technologies were also touting a similar configuration designed to reduce radiation exposure to the user.

To consider the next level of mixed reality—putting very realistic but not real images into the real world—we must learn about ray tracing, a technology that I only became aware of recently. I had seen the result of ray tracing, but only recently did I become fully aware of and interested in the technology behind it. A basic understanding required some research and focused learning to better understand it and its capabilities. Ray tracing is the technique modern high-quality movies rely on to generate or enhance those amazing special effects. Consider the creation of artificial but super realistic objects, reflections, refractions and shadows. That is what makes spaceships and exploding planets in sci-fi epics so amazing. It makes fast cars, screaming fighter planes and epic war scenes including the mega explosions look so frightening and real.

To give provide a basic understanding of ray tracing, let me quote from NVIDIA’s Brian Caulfield's blog:

“What is ray tracing? The easiest way to think of ray tracing is to look around you, right now. The objects you’re seeing are illuminated by beams of light. Now turn that around and follow the path of those beams backwards from your eye to the objects that light interacts with. That’s ray tracing. Historically, though, computer hardware hasn’t been fast enough to use these techniques in real time, such as in video games. Moviemakers can take as long as they like to render a single frame, so they do it offline in render farms. Video games have only a fraction of a second. As a result, most real-time graphics rely on another technique, rasterization. Real-time computer graphics have long used a technique called “rasterization” to display three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional screen. It’s fast. And, the results have gotten very good. With rasterization, objects on the screen are created from a mesh of virtual triangles, or polygons, that create 3D models of objects.

“Ray tracing is different. In the real-world, the 3D objects we see are illuminated by light sources, and photons can bounce from one object to another before reaching the viewer’s eyes. Ray tracing captures those effects by working back from our eye. It traces the path of a light ray through each pixel on a 2D viewing surface out into a 3D model of the scene. As GPUs continue to grow more powerful, putting ray tracing to work for ever more people is the next logical step. For example, armed with ray-tracing tool—and powerful GPUs—product designers and architects use ray tracing to generate photorealistic mockups of their products in seconds. As GPUs offer ever more computing power, video games are the next frontier for this technology.”

What does this have to do with XR and the AWE show? ADSHIR, a small and previously almost unknown company, was showing some of their real-time innovative AR ray tracing technology, which enables graphics quality in XR, previously possible only within the animated film industry, which also uses ray tracing to place virtual objects into the real world. You can see the virtual objects on the screen and if you place a mirror to reflect the area, you can also see them in the mirror’s reflection on the screen. To get a good idea, check out the short video below. Ray tracing is playing an increasing role in XR. As people enjoy new movies and advanced gaming and other forms of XR, they can begin to understand how it is possible and how virtually anything is becoming possible.

When working or playing in a virtual world, one challenge has been how to control the objects around you. In the real world, we just think what we want to pick up and move or what button to push and our brain directs our hand to do it. We really do not have to think much about it. In an XR world, devices such as keyboards and mice and now handheld and even wearable controllers give us control.

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