This Indian Startup May Soon Be A Big Name In AR Entertainment, With Their Cheap AR Headset
At its Annual General Meeting today, Reliance Jio had a few announcements to make. But one part of the event was a demo of a cool new device called Holoboard. It¡¯s an AR headset developed by an Indian company called Tesseract.
At its Annual General Meeting today, Reliance Jio had a few interesting announcements to make.
But one part of the event was a demo of a cool new device called Holoboard. It's an AR headset developed by an Indian company called Tesseract.
The Holoboard AR headset - Images courtesy Tesseract Imaging Pvt Ltd
Founded by Kshitijij Marwah, Tesseract has previously developed innovative camera technologies, including the 'Methane', a 360-degree camera for VR, and a similar device fro smartphones called 'Quark'. Then some time ago it began working on an augmented reality headset that's now ready for consumers.
"Imagine the next time when you are watching a cricket match in your house," Marwah tells MIT Technology Review. Rather than sitting in front of your television, with our Quark camera streaming the match live in VR and the Holoboard headset, you can feel as if you are sitting right in the stadium but in the comfort of your couch."
The Holoboard is similar to Microsoft's HoloLens. It's a self-contained AR headset that projects holograms on a display in front of the eyes, effectively laying out virtual objects in the real environment around you.
The main difference here is that Holoboard uses your smartphone camera (and a custom app) to work. The headset itself is lightweight so you can just slide your phone in. It then uses built-in 3D tracking and mapping software, along with your phone camera, to project objects in a 90-degree field of view around you.
In that way, it's more similar to the Google Cardboard than the HoloLens.
The Holoboard, alongside the Quark 360 and Methane VR cameras
The device works with both Android and iOS devices and is expected to be priced around Rs 10,000. The fact that it's that much cheaper already makes it a more viable consumer product than AR headsets before it.
Just how well it works though, we're going to have to wait and see.