I’ll never forget my first experience with the Oculus Rift. It was mind-blowing. I’ll also never forget my first moment of dissonance — the moment when the illusion was shattered. When I lifted my hands toward my eyes, and my hands didn’t exist.
That feeling was super weird. Soon it may be a thing of the past.
Because Oculus has just acquired Pebble, a company specialising in “depth sensing technology and computer vision”. What have they been working on? Well, I’m glad you asked.
The above video shows off technology that seems to display super realistic hands that move like yours do in the real world.
This is what we need!
Nadav Grossinger, CTO of Pebbles Interfaces said the following about the acquisition.
At Pebbles Interfaces, we’ve been focused on pushing the limits of digital sensing technology to accelerate the future of human-computer interaction. Through micro-optics and computer vision, we hope to improve the information that can be extracted from optical sensors, which will help take virtual reality to the next level. We’ve always believed visual computing will be the next major platform in our lifetime, and we’re excited to join the Oculus team to achieve that vision for the future.
I have no idea how this technology works, but I’m excited about it. What happens when we can actually interact with virtual reality worlds with out hands? Oh man. The future is (kinda almost) here.
Comments
8 responses to “Virtual Reality Using Your Own Hands Is Now A ‘Virtual Reality’”
It’s like Virtual Boy with a Wiimote.
I think you will still need a controller for move around and such, but being able to stop and visually interact with objects with the hands instead of buttons and motions will be handy.
Someone has made a 360 degree direction treadmill somewheres. It’d be a big rig for sure, but imagine the exercise o_o
Its not that impressive, you must lean into the direction your wanting to walk and it has no other allowed positions but standing. I hope they are able to make good improvements in Gen.2
Will we each Star Trek holodeck quality in say…10 years time?
50-100 yrs I think. This is still a guy with an LCD monitor strapped to his face, super cool nonetheless
https://web.archive.org/web/20150322083104/http://pebblesinterfaces.com/#the-team
If you want to see their pre-oculus website, you will need to ‘scroll’.
I think Holodeck will not really happen, we will likely see The Matrix type of VR in the future. Holodeck is way more advanced then even the matrix as it must materialize matter to from the VR. So I would say a good 300-500yrs away for that tech.