Augmented reality company Leap Motion has revealed an incredible demo that shows someone playing a seamless game of virtual ping pong on a very real ping pong table.
The demo was designed to show off just how accurate motion tracking has become, allowing us to interact with virtual objects at the same speed as physical ones.
In the future the company envisages players being able to take on virtual opponents whether it’s ping pong, tennis and it could even be used in conventional video game formats like first person shooters.
How it all works is actually pretty remarkable. The wearer has a headset on that beams your virtual opponents paddle and the ball directly into your eyeball.
Then using a combination of 3D cameras on the headset and motion sensors on the paddle the headset is able to create a virtual ball that looks and behaves as though it’s right there in front of you.
If that wasn’t impressive enough, the headset then has to calculate exactly how hard you’ve hit the ball and then accurately move the ball as though you were actually hitting it.
Augmented reality has the potential to completely change how we interact with the world.
By placing the virtual into the physical world it gives us the ability to play video games on the surfaces of our tables, check our emails just by looking up at our walls and even watch films suspended in thin air.
Leap Motion certainly aren’t the only company working on this technology. For the last few years Apple has been studiously pushing the technology for its iPhones and iPads.
Magic Leap on the other hand have been focusing on headsets, something which the secretive company finally shared with the world through its own very impressive demo video.
The technology is still several years away from being consumer-ready, but seeing how far we’ve already come shows that the gap between prototype and something you’ll buy from PC World is closing fast.