Recently, Microsoft designer and game developer Oscar Saladin shared a post on Medium showcasing new capabilities for HoloLens, a tech company.
In the post, Saladin shows how the HoloLens, an augmented reality (AR) pair of smart glasses, allows users to manipulate holographic objects as if they were real ones. Even giving the user the ability to throw the objects around a room or summon them with “telekinesis.”
Watch how it works below.
Saladin notes that they came up with the HoloLens’ new capability in order to make AR interactions feel more natural. The designer says the HoloLens team looked into how they could make interacting with objects a more realistic experience. One that, despite the lack of touch, still feels like a real interaction.
“As articulated hand tracking with HoloLens 2 gives us the pose of a hand, we can construct a physically simulated twin of your hand in the virtual world by replicating the positions, velocities, and momentum of different parts of the hand,” Saladin writes in his post. “When this virtual hand interacts with virtual objects, [our] physics engine simulates the outcome, applying momentum, collision, friction, and gravity.”
Just as video games use physics engines to handle open-ended interactions between objects, so too does the HoloLens. This means the smart glasses can faithfully model the “physical” interactions between a user’s virtual hand and the virtual objects they’re manipulating. Including when the objects are floating in midair.
We’ll take one please!
Photo| iStock
