13 Augmenting Virtual Reality
This chapter covers
- • Combining real and virtual inputs inside the Rift
- • Exploring panorama images (sometimes called photo spheres) in VR
- • Using a webcam to bring live video into the Rift
- • Using multiple webcams to bring live 3D stereo into the Rift
- • The Leap Motion SDK in action, showing live hand-pose capture
- • The mathematical challenges of aligning and synchronizing multiple sensor streams
- • Just a few of the ideas that could be possible with digitally augmented reality
Augmented Reality (AR) is the use of computers to digitally enhance one’s view of the real world. AR isn’t sci-fi, it’s real today: example include the heads-up display overlaid on a fighter pilot’s cockpit, glasses that projects a map of your planned route on a tiny screen near your eye, or mobile phone games that shows the room you’re standing in with extra ghosts and goblins added on. AR is rapidly becoming one of the most active fields in the computing industry, because it’s such an open-ended challenge with so much potential to improve day-to-day life. Especially as mobile phones become so utterly ubiquitous, the potential for digitally enhancing the everyday world seems limitless.
All of that said, this chapter is not about Augmented Reality. This chapter is about Virtual Reality and how you can augment it with information from the real world.