Virtual Reality is Takings Steps Closer To Landing in Your Living Room

While scouring the Los Angeles Convention Center floors for unusual E3 stories, we came across a group of people wearing virtual reality glasses and swinging foam swords and shields at each other.  Given our interest in the as-yet-unrealized potential of virtual reality, this naturally piqued our curiosity.

It turns out a company named Digital Extreme Technologies, Inc. was showing off its prototype “camera based video overlay vision” hardware named the RealityPro game system.The system’s virtual reality glasses we tried on were connected to a small handheld-size player unit that communicated wirelessly with another set of glasses.  The system plays games and applications via a slot for mini flash cartridges much like a typical handheld gaming system. The glasses themselves were a little bulky in their current form, but VP of Product Development Bob Ladrach promises a more slim-lined model in a year or so.

As we tried on the glasses, we saw everything that we had seen without the glasses (tables, brochures, a middle-aged guy), but the “Wow!” came once we held a bladeless foam sword and shield up in front of our faces. Different from most systems that attempt (with very mixed results) to recreate digitally the entire fictional world around you, the RealityPro glasses only created a digital image of the sword hilt and blade we held as well as a shield that overlaid our real-world environment. read more…