We all know that VR giants have kicked off a huge battle. Titans are entering the fighting arena: Facebook, HTC, HP are in a VR war.
On the other front, fighting for the AR/MR space, we have Microsoft and Magic Leap.
We also know that most people are not rushing to buy super expensive AR & VR headsets (and that the market cap is tiny at the moment), but a lot of talented people have now joined the race, with many of them trying to create the market themselves.
Until now, if you were to ask a crowd which the most popular AR experience is, most of them would mention Pokemon Go because it was a tremendous success with more than 650 million downloads worldwide.
Recently, another AR experience has become a hot topic of discussion and hit the front page of Reddit. This experience, however, was not in gaming, but in art.
ARLOOPA studio created a virtual door and allowed its app users to walk into Van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom.
You might think what's the hype? Many others are creating such portals, so what’s new in that, but hey, don’t rush.
In the ARLOOPA app, there is a very interesting function that changes the view into the Mixed Reality mode and lets you view the AR object in Mixed Reality. However, when you do this with the Van Gogh room experience, you get ARKit/ARCore 6DoF tracking with millimetre-precise movements in the room.
Another prominent experience developed by the company is the Matrix White Room, which uses the same logic and gets the user into the nostalgic scene of the famous science fiction movie.
If you still don’t get what this means, it means that you are experiencing the same thing as if you were wearing a Vive Focus, which would cost some $799 and would be shipped next month or an Oculus Quest, which is not available yet :)
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/FairSmallElkhound-mobile.mp4
I talked to the team of wizards behind the ARLOOPA app and asked how they developed this hack.
Arman Atoyan, the CEO, said that with a smart hack from the team, a regular 20$ VR box could help you have a precise VR experience even in larger space. They are opening a new dimension with their AR app, where you can even experience mixed or virtual reality games by downloading them from the catalog.
2 years ago to set up live tracking and room space positioning of a user and their head, you might spend $100K, now it’s free if you have an ARKit or ARCore supported device.
So the funny thing is that in the short term this might get 1000 times more users than any of the big brands.
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