If you’ve watched Iron Man then you’ll know of Jarvis, Tony Starks’ virtual personal assistant complete with augmented reality hologram technology and genius artificial intelligence.  Tony has the ability to create holograms of almost anything in front of him, and lacks the need for a computer or a screen for that matter. You’d be crazy not to want to have that type of kit at home helping out on a day to day basis. Yesterday Meta started it’s Kickstarter campaign and is a step towards this new age of technology.
Meta is dubbed to be “The Most Advanced Augmented Reality Interface“ yet with movement tracking and gesture controls through a pair of glasses mounted with 2 cameras. Whilst this piece of kit could one day be hacked into Google Glass it’s not like we’re going to be seeing that any time soon, so Meta have stepped up to the plate. The Meta tracks movement through it’s two cameras “left and right eye style” but also tracks surfaces for use as tables or such things, an application they show off with the architecture mockup with the palm trees. The objects that are created within the glasses is set to be around 5 metres away but some special stereoscopic effects are then applied to the distance when it takes into account tracking the room.
Right now there’s no major break through and there isn’t any massively groundbreaking applications for it but it’s potential is ridiculous. There will be an open-source 3D app store especially for the Meta and with the whole device being open source we’re going to see some crazy stuff.
The developers kit is available on the Kickstarter page for $750 (£490 & P+P) which is a fair amount to be paying for something by any standards but to set a standard to augmented reality that nobody else has yet tampered with there will be a steep price. The project is just over 3/4 of it’s goals and it’s only been up for just over a day so it’s well on it’s way to success but it’s just exciting to see what comes of it in the future.
