One of the must-see mad gadgets of this year’s Tokyo Game Show was Sony’s new Headmount Display, a futuristic visor that acts as a personal 3D viewer – and much more.
Two different models were on show: the HMZ-T2 is the consumer model, which goes on sale in Japan in October at around 70,000 yen ($900). This was at Sony’s PlayStation booth, where lucky gamers who got a spot could play games in 3D up very, very close indeed.
But behind closed doors, Sony was also showing its Prototype-SR model, which I got to try for myself.
SR stands for substituted reality, an advanced version of the sort of augmented reality you get on handhelds and mobile devices that is startlingly close to real life. This version of the visor comes equipped with an HD camera on the front, so that what you see when you first put on the goggles is your actual environment. You can move your head around in any direction and see what’s in front of you, as though looking through a pair of regular glasses.
That is, until they start to mess with you.
As I sat on a swivel chair in a perfectly white room, a woman clad in a white lab coat fitted the visor and headphones and had me track her around the room, asking me to confirm that I could see her as we went to the left, the center and the right.
I was then shown a full-length trailer for Resident Evil: Retribution. After it was done, I was back in the white room and the lab assistant was still in front of me. Or so I thought.
As she suddenly dropped to the floor, her body convulsing, and then transformed into a zombie and lunged for me, I have to say it took me a second to realize that I was actually watching a video of the assistant, superimposed over the real white room – all still responding perfectly to my head movements.
Then the no-longer-zombified assistant had me track her left, center and right again, asking me a couple of times to confirm I could still see her – just as she’d done before. But then a second, identical woman appeared beside her and, using my name so I’d know which one was real, explained that I’d been looking at a video image again.
The only clue I’d had was that when a moment earlier I’d answered yes, I could see her, she’d reacted just slightly too late. That aside, the illusion was impeccable. Both with the real woman and the video, I could look down at any time to see her shoes, up to see her face, up further to gaze at the ceiling and lose her completely.
After that, the real woman (I think) walked out of the room through one door and through another came violinist in a flowing dress. As she serenaded me, she paced the room, the headphones’ stereo mix representing her violin’s location in relation to my moving head. Again, I could look her up and down at will, or stare the other way completely, and she blended perfectly with the white room in which I sat. The whole experience was pretty much seamless.
The SR visor is not yet for sale, and its applications are still highly experimental. The headset itself is heavy, so heavy that I thought I might be in for a nosebleed (one of the engineers told me afterwards that they’d been testing them on small-nosed people). I had a minor headache for a couple of hours too, as my long-sighted eyes dealt with the extreme proximity of the visor’s screens (though it can actually be worn over glasses). And the fan pointed directly at my head during the demo did little to stem the flow of sweat as the equipment heated up.
But just imagine plugging that in to your PlayStation and immersing yourself completely on the battlefield of COD, the twisted landscapes of Skyrim or the car chases of GTA. Right now SR still seems like future tech – but my hands-on experience proved that the future is not always as far off as it seems.
Source : ign[dot]com
