The best AR headset is the one you make yourself – Project North Star

-- NEW VENUE: MEDIA CITY BERGEN!! --

Augmented reality, AR, is an interactive experience of extending the real-world by the computer-generated information. The real world is augmented, which gives the name to the set of technology solutions. Recently, we see the growing interest from the side of hardware manufacturers, developers and researchers to bring the technology to the life of every-day consumers. The Benefits that the consumers could potentially get from AR are more visible if we even imagine the amount of data we are collecting about the world, but not showing back.

AR headset hardware is following interesting path of development. From the simple AR glasses, to full mounted AR headsets supported by their own computational units, mobiles or PCs. Actually, the number of AR headsets is still growing over several past years, some interesting examples would be Hololens, Magic Leap One, Meta 2, or MagiMask. All of them are having a mixed degree of good/not-so-good specifications for AR, like field of view, available processing power and sometimes overly high price.

To overcome the fragmentation of the specification, and also to open the door for the possibility of having the best solution have emerged Project North Star. Project North Star is an open-source solution for AR headset originally developed by Leap Motion company. The documentation allows quite an extensive degree of customization for the headset, from the size of the display panels showing the content, their resolution, size of the lenses, up to the type of used sensors. We are no longer limited by the hardware, but rather we are allowed to extend or change hardware by our, and our customers, need. This customization allows us to customize the hardware part of the AR development for the customers, which is a valuable extension to the existing set of AR headsets.

In this talk, Ivan will talk about how he and his colleagues have analyzed the project and constructed their own, simplified version of the headset. He will present the pitfalls of the creation of the headset and upcoming possibilities to continue.

About Ivan

Ivan Kolesar is an expert in the fields of Virtual reality, Augmented reality and visualization. He has finished his masters in Slovakia with the specialization of Applied Informatics. Afterwards, he has done his PhD in University of Bergen in the visualization group. During his studies he has acquired extensive knowledge about the visualization research, advanced software development and strong feeling for enthusiasm for any new technology.

AGENDA

17:15-18:00 - Mat på Media City Bergen i kantinen (1.etasjen)

18:00- ca 19:00 - Project North Star

19:00-: - Geek Beer på MCB