One of Boston’s many great, local interest groups – Boston Virtual Reality – held a tech demo meetup this evening featuring two hardware developers in the burgeoning fields of augmented & virtual reality – Meta and Leap Motion.
Before I tell you more, a quick sidenote to define these fields: virtual reality (VR) has, of course, been around in various incarnations for years – the latest variation centers around the invention of the Oculus Rift, an immersive headset that has stereoscopic screens for you to see content which pans and moves with your physical head movement.
Slightly different in concept, augmented reality (AR) also uses a headset but, rather than rely on an immersive experience created using screens, AR headsets (like Microsoft’s Hololens, which I wrote about not too long ago) superimpose digital images on top of your view of the real world – images you can interact with using your hands.