Watch: Augmented Reality App Created for Virtual Reality Headset

Last week we were speculating on Philip Rosedale's comment that VR is preferable to AR, since after all, you can use the video camera capabilities of many virtual reality headsets to create an augmented reality experience within VR. And then a guy named TonyVT Skarredghost came by to comment that he'd done exactly that: 

I already do AR with the Focus. (At the link you can also find an opensource plugin for that that I made for Unity) and also mixed reality.  And I can guarantee you that is pretty awesome. And it has the potential of showing a modified view of the world... so not only virtual objects added to the world.

Read about it on his blog post cleverly entitled, "How to create an Augmented Reality app for the Vive Focus in Unity". Tony gets pretty deep into the technical weeds of making AR possible on a VR platform. For instance, it involves hacking the Vive Focus' camera streams:

 

I fixed the UVs so there was no mirroring, adjusted the dimensions of the quad so that the stream had the right aspect ratio, added some callbacks to make the app resume correctly after a pause, and implemented the process to request the authorization to use the camera stream. In the end, I managed to see the cameras stream correctly in 3D in front of my eyes! It worked!!

Much more here if you want the hardcore details. The truly hardcore can check out the code (and add to it) on TonyVT Skarredghost's GitHub.

Comments

[TonyVT Skarredghost]

Wow, it has been an honor to see my name on your blog! Amazing! Thanks for sharing my work