Gadgetory

this is Shawn Hollister with the verge and I'm here at Maker Faire taking a look at cast a are a pair of prototype augmented reality glasses built by a spin-off of Valve Corporation but today I'm playing with this infrared wand picking off blocks from these Jenga like towers in 3d this is happening right in front of me on a retro reflective surface there's a pair of projectors on these glasses that are sending light towards the surface the bouncing back towards each of my eyes happening at 120 Hertz so that it's smooth and fluid in three dimensions and I can I can just walk around this and look at it from different angles because there's infrared infrared LEDs built into the surface as well and a camera right on top of the glasses so it detects exactly where I am so now we're going to take a look at a demo of augmented reality with real world objects I can put in these little bitty cards in the game and have them grow up and become Team Fortress 2 characters and now we've got the scout and the heavy from Team Fortress 2 fighting each other the cards use RFID chips inside and interact with a coil beneath the based and so you can tell when they're on the right position when they're on the right spot to bring these characters to life in the virtual world so here we have a couple of pairs of these glasses here because we're going to play a multiplayer game and now we're going to begin zombie king of the hill capture the flag both of us are looking at the retro-reflective surface simultaneously but because of the way it reflects the light we can actually both see independent images at the same time each have our own 3d perspective on the game our objective I think is to try to kill the zombies and hold on the flag but pretty sure Jerry just shot me so right now we've got a very rudimentary retro reflective surface in front of us it's held together with tape and it's just a small small area for a couple people to have a nice intimate game of capture the flag King of Hell zombies together but you can imagine much more grand things with more players and and and more of the surface and a higher quality surface as well if you place the surface on the walls of a room and brought some friends over you could have an entire virtual reality experience around you and every other wall you look at could be part of the game as soon as you turn around technical illusions is targeting a sub $200 price for the starter kit which they plan to raise funds for on Kickstarter starting in late summer and early fall as you can see it's a fairly hefty pair of wired PC goggles but they've got some grand plans down the road the technical illusions team just showed me a prototype with B projectors built into the frames of the glasses and they'd like to connect it to smartphones soon