The castAR Kickstarter has started!

Check it out:

Great overview video from Jeri about how castAR came about and what it does.

g.

Wow! I only thought of simulation projection, and was worried about the popularity of this thing...

now seeing the board game implementations... you can't go wrong with dragons today apparently :)

This thing is gonna be huge!

Indeed. I certainly hope that ED are paying attention. :D

The KS has only been active about six hours and it's nearly to the 50% mark.

g.

My problem with it is it looks like it's only tabletop AR. I want full room AR. I don't think they're going in that direction though considering the size of the AR areas they talk about.

You could use the retro-reflective material as wallpaper and have a huge environment to work in. Table top gaming is a simple and easy to understand example.

I'm going to be using this as the visual system for my F-15. I don't put down serious coin for something I think _might_ work. The potential for this makes my collimated display efforts laughable.

Imagine building a "display cube" like Flim, but not having to buy a single projector to make it work? It's like that. You can add as many tracking targets as needed in order to guarantee coverage where ever you can move your head. (They're going to release the specs on the targets so you can make your own if you want - they're modulated IR LEDs driven by a microcontroller.)

g.

Would be interesting. Interpreting the video, that would mean a lot of this retro-reflective material and embedded IR LEDs that blink certain codes for position calibration. Pondering what a sphere or a cube configuration might work like. Personally, I'm interested in that sort of IR LED thing anyways to assist with auto-calibration on Nthusim products.

Imagine the inside of a canopy covered in the retro-reflective material. I might be over-simplifying things though.

The canopy glass would be too close in (I think the min focus distance is around 18-24"), but you could probably build a shell around the outside of the canopy that would do the job - I may do this myself. I'm still in the "my head is exploding" phase. :D

I'm still on the fence on whether or not I'm going to go from *two gamer package* plus the extras I wanted, to the *EARLY castAR GLASSES* level PLUS the two gamer package. My poor credit card is in the corner whimpering as it is. :)

g.

My credit card is shot. I can't even do a single package at the moment. I might be able to pledge the first week of november though.

I just saw Jeri's vid on youtube and came strait here to see if anyone else had seen this. The potential to have 3D wrap around and still interact with a cockpit has to be

What made my head explode was when she showed the clip-on that reflects the projection back into your eyes.

With the outward projection, they're bringing a part of the virtual reality into the real world. Which is perfect for simulation and those board games.

But most of pc/console gamers want to be fully immersed into the virtual world. And with the clip on they covered both markets.

I'd say oculus rift just became obsolete.

I'd say oculus rift just became obsolete.

It's a little to soon to say something like that, IMHO, but it is certainly going to be interesting.

There are a lot of things we still don't know like FOV and head tracking latency. If they address that, I'll be very happy. :)

I'm interested in knowing the resolution on those tiny projectors. what kind of image defenition can we expect?

Looks very interesting

She mentions in the longer video that they're now working with "HD" projectors which I'm assuming is different from the 720p projectors they were working with.

From the things I've read, the latency isn't an issue and the head tracking is within .07mm. The tracking also handles "zoom" (kind of like how trackir will "zoom" into the panel when you move your head closer to the screen), which is something that OR doesn't handle (or so I've read).

I bet if you sign up for the forum and post your questions, they'll get answered as soon as they wake up from catching up 2 days of lost sleep. :)

g.

It's awesome stuff and it's great to live in these times where hardware will soon allow for what was sci-fi 30 years ago, but I somewhat fail to see it as a competitor of the Oculus Rift but rather an alternative for a different experience. How I see it, CastAR is for projection of dynamic content for people who still want a good connection to the real world, sort of a middle-ground between good old screens and true VR, while Oculus rift completely immerses and surrounds you into a virtual world, totally cutting you from the Real World.

Both have advantages and disadvantages, for people who have built-in cockpits and/or who absolutely needs to see what their hands are doing (i.e complicated controllers like keyboards etc) and/or whose senses cannot seem to overcome the possible motion sickness then the CastAR is a good tool. Personally with my simple HOTAS I don't see why I'd buy a CastAR when an Oculus Rift completely immerses me in a virtual world without the needs for installing these screen panels, without any screen border limitation and the usual ambient light environment setup needed for projectors. Cool stuff nonetheless!

I don't see this being suitable for flight sim any more than what TrackIR provides... you have to look at one point all the time... in flight sim... in cockpit you want to have to physically move your head to look your side, rear, up... not turn your head and keep your eyed looking the other way... in my opinion virtual reality headset is much better.

I don't see this being suitable for flight sim any more than what TrackIR provides... you have to look at one point all the time... in flight sim... in cockpit you want to have to physically move your head to look your side, rear, up... not turn your head and keep your eyed looking the other way... in my opinion virtual reality headset is much better.

Well, in all fairness I think I read some time ago that what's projected has a good enough FOV that your eyes can't see the end of it. So I think that, supposedly, it would allow for a rather natural feel in terms of eyes vs head movement but, provided you are completely surrounded with these screens...

Would be interesting. Interpreting the video, that would mean a lot of this retro-reflective material and embedded IR LEDs that blink certain codes for position calibration. Pondering what a sphere or a cube configuration might work like. Personally, I'm interested in that sort of IR LED thing anyways to assist with auto-calibration on Nthusim products.

 

Imagine the inside of a canopy covered in the retro-reflective material. I might be over-simplifying things though.

I've seen autocalibrating projector screens a couple of years ago, with 4 light sensors, one for each corner, reading the light of the projector.

They were described by Johnny Lee, who's known for some excelent headtracking/touchscreen mods for Wiimote.

They could merge something like that with castAR I suppose.

EDIT: Hmm, hadn't seen the RFID video before, it seems to be the same thing as the video I posted.

I don't see this being suitable for flight sim any more than what TrackIR provides... you have to look at one point all the time... in flight sim... in cockpit you want to have to physically move your head to look your side, rear, up... not turn your head and keep your eyed looking the other way... in my opinion virtual reality headset is much better.

Actually you could build a sort of dome with the material. Much like military simulators, but the only portion beeing rendered would be where you had your eye. That would actually bring a GPU/CPU workload advantage.

It's awesome stuff and it's great to live in these times where hardware will soon allow for what was sci-fi 30 years ago, but I somewhat fail to see it as a competitor of the Oculus Rift but rather an alternative for a different experience. How I see it, CastAR is for projection of dynamic content for people who still want a good connection to the real world, sort of a middle-ground between good old screens and true VR, while Oculus rift completely immerses and surrounds you into a virtual world, totally cutting you from the Real World.

 

Both have advantages and disadvantages, for people who have built-in cockpits and/or who absolutely needs to see what their hands are doing (i.e complicated controllers like keyboards etc) and/or whose senses cannot seem to overcome the possible motion sickness then the CastAR is a good tool. Personally with my simple HOTAS I don't see why I'd buy a CastAR when an Oculus Rift completely immerses me in a virtual world without the needs for installing these screen panels, without any screen border limitation and the usual ambient light environment setup needed for projectors. Cool stuff nonetheless!

I don't see this being suitable for flight sim any more than what TrackIR provides... you have to look at one point all the time... in flight sim... in cockpit you want to have to physically move your head to look your side, rear, up... not turn your head and keep your eyed looking the other way... in my opinion virtual reality headset is much better.

Did you guys even check it out?? :D

It has a clip on, that makes the glasses non-transparent and reflective so it can do exactly what oculus can, plus what it normally does. So it's 2 devices in 1. Outward projection, and inward.

And where did you get you'd have to look at a single point? You can freely move your head in 6dof.

Yes I did check the vid and KS and have been following the project from a distance since a few weeks. They dedicate about 3 seconds about that feature on their promotional trailer which pretty much says all there is to say, it's there as an additional feature, but don't expect it to be anywhere near the OR experience.

I mean, the OR's been researching the right monitors, the right hardware engineering with using a big goggle and all for years and are still having big issues with it in terms of resolution. If CastAR would ever succeed where OR didn't and was only a matter of putting on a clip, you'd bet it'd be the main feature they would be advertising about by far. I understand you're excited about it, and with good reasons, but don't think that CastAR is a CastAR + OR combined cause you will be in for a huge disappointment imho.

Yeah valid points.

Although I think disappointment would never be an option. Even if it has a million problems. Coming from a single 1080p monitor to a full 3d AR/VR with 6dof is a game changer for sure.

Even if you can't actually play the game on it, the flying experience alone is enough to blow your mind.

According to the few oculus reviews I've seen.

Now if only developers find time and resources to make it compatible with their products...

I think for this to work well you'd need a proper 360° circular dome projection and the projectors would need to have 180° FoV, and if with high enough resolution, then I agree it's likely to work very well. But then I wonder if very high FoV in game (taking DCS for example) you get stretched image on the corners and it won't look good... anyway,I'm bit skeptical about this.

So what is the FOV and resolution of this thing?