Three months ago, the well-known video game publisher Valve did something out of the ordinary: the company fired about 25 employees, which they called “grand cleaning”. At the same time, Gabe Newell, the co-founder of the company, quickly reassured gamers that work on all projects would continue. However, it turned out that one project is still curtailed. Guess what?
Valve secretly developed a pair of augmented reality glasses. And these glasses are still with two Valve employees who lost their jobs that day.
Jerry Ellsworth, a former Valve hardware engineer, and Rick Johnson , a programmer, worked on this project for about a year, and now spend six days a week and sixteen hours a day to continue working.
“We believed that one day it would change how people interact with computers and play games,” says Ellsworth in an interview with The Verge. “This is what I am going to do at all costs. Then in Valve it did not make any sense, but now we just have to finish them. "
The engineer founded the company Technical Illusions to put the technology on a commercial basis. And now - a crazy prototype for the first time goes to the public.
The glasses are called CastAR and have nothing to do with Google Glass or Oculus Rift. The bottom line is that glasses design a small virtual reality that you can see and interact with in its three dimensions in the real world. Looks like this is about what we showed in the film Sight.
The basis of the work points are four components. First, it is a pair of miniature projectors attached to glasses attached to a computer. Secondly, these are special retroreflective filters that reflect the projection on your face. Thirdly, these are active shutter filters that create images separately for the left and right eyes 120 times per second, so you see the picture in 3D.
The last — and most cunning — component is the camera built into the glasses, which deals with the infrared positioning of the edges of the displays, so glasses can optically determine the position of your head, leaving the software to adjust the three-dimensional perspective in real time. You can physically inspect objects that do not even exist. Additional cameras the size of a penny determine the remaining objects. Also available infrared wand.
Glue and bare chips.
As the journalist writes The Verge , he played a destructive game of Jenga, crushing virtual turrets from blocks with balls with the help of a stick. “I stretched my neck, trying to look down, and saw them fly to the surface of the table. I flew over the rough Minecraft landscapes, using only my head for control. I liked how CastAR can work with virtual toys thanks to the placement of RFID markers on the surface, which grow into Team Fortress 2 characters.
Finally, Ellsworth presented me the best that one can imagine. We played a multiplayer game with two Xbox controllers, standing shoulder to shoulder, laughing at each other as the zombies fell in some kind of shooter. We looked in the same place, but the glasses gave a unique 3D perspective to each of us.
Thanks to the retroreflective surface, a lot of light comes back to the viewer, so there was very little crosstalk between the players. You can see only what is intended for you, so you can play immediately together. The glasses give a lot of light to use the device in a moderately sunny room. Theoretically, it is possible to create a separate room, like a holoder, by placing retroreflective surfaces on each of the walls.
It is worth noting that although the glasses are very impressive, the design itself is still very raw and not suitable for public taste. Even Oculus Rift, virtual reality glasses, glued together with duct tape and a dream, hold on much more tightly than the CastAR prototypes, on which Ellsworth spent 40 hours of painstaking soldering. Glue and bare chips - on the topic of the day.
The project is in an experimental phase, and the team itself notes that although some projects caused a storm of enthusiastic applause, others were not very impressive.
The final product through the eyes of the artist.
After the Maker Faire exhibition, at which CastAR glasses were shown, it will be for Kickstarter: in late summer or early autumn, all interested will be able to invest in the development of the system. Ellsworth and Johnson hope that they can reduce the cost of points to $ 200, or even lower, thanks to the common components of the device and their own experience. Ellsworth made cheap chips, ranging from video decoders to video game components, as well as among his personal merits a cheap tracking infrared chip. Johnson did software that helps people make games. He managed to change the game code while we were playing. But before the glasses really see the light, there is still a lot of work to be done: the software, the wands, and the glasses.
Currently, the task of developers is to create a platform, provide hardware to developers and see what they can do. It is too early to say that this will be a real product that will be sold. Too early.
And now the main question. If the idea was so fantastic, why did Valve abandon it ? The Technical Illusions team is not very comfortable talking about this:
“I left and called all my friends, colleagues, people I could find. Many of them are still there. I wish them all the best in what they are doing, and I would not want to disturb them or thwart their plans. ”
Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson
Valve's hardware initiative worked simultaneously on augmented reality and on virtual. Virtual reality has won. “You probably know that Valve is better known in a certain class of games,” says Johnson. Augmented reality is simply not suitable for first-person shooters, on which Valve has built its reputation.
With all this, Ellsworth and Johnson did not want to leave. “I didn’t want to do either DR or BP, but someone in our group was delighted with them, and we had to work together,” says Ellsworth. However, six months later, she decided that the future was beyond augmented reality, and apparently unleashed an internal struggle in Valve. At that time, Jones worked in the Linux division of Valve and in his spare time helped Ellsworth in her passion for arcade machines.
“I made a billion first-person shooters and I finally got the chance to try something fundamentally new. That's the whole me, ”he notes.
For its part, Valve lost all interest in the project, giving the Technical Illusions team the absolute authority to do the work they love. Here is what Ellsworth says:
“Gabe was completely over. I spoke with Gabe, he spoke with lawyers and decided: “Let them do it,” because I saw that we were completely passionate about. ”
The article is based on materials .
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