MR headset will turn your living room into a playground

21st November 2016

Stereolabs

Alice Matthews

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Mixed Reality has tremendous potential for gaming, but it’s not without its challenges. According to Stereolabs, current solutions like Hololens suffer from a limited field of view and display transparent holograms which break the sense of presence and realism. It also requires you to map out the entire area before use.

Stereolabs is breaking augmented reality free from these limitations and bringing true mixed reality to the gaming industry. Linq is a Mixed Reality headset that transforms your room into a spatial display for gaming and entertainment. It creates and defines a Mixed Reality category by bringing the best of virtual and augmented reality together.

Through high definition stereo cameras, the headset blends the virtual and real worlds together in an immersive and photorealistic way. Linq understands the world around it and perceives people and objects in space up to 20m away. The Linq demo sees the user pick a virtual gun and shoot at alien robots while dodging lasers. Virtual objects explode into people walking in the scene, cast shadows on the floor and illuminate the room like any real-life object would.

“For years, we’ve been playing on flat displays. We want to change that forever,” said Stereolabs CEO, Cecile Schmollgruber. “The room is your display. Linq is bringing to life the most stunning, visually rich mixed-reality experience ever seen. It is a jump to the next-gen of entertainment and gaming.”

How it works
The magic comes from Linq’s front-mounted sensor, a version of Stereolabs’ ZED stereo camera that replicates the way human vision works and perceives the world. Linq’s built-in camera scans the environment in real-time and provides 6DoF inside-out world-scale positional tracking without the need for any external sensor. Users can walk, jump, crouch and even dodge projectiles, with every movement captured in the MR experience itself. They don’t need to map out the entire playing field first in order to play.

The sensor technology stands in contrast to the IR-based sensors of most headsets: it works indoors and outdoors, at longer ranges, isn’t subject to interference from other sensors and is cost-effective.

What next?
Linq will launch for select developers and partners in early 2017 before moving to a wider release later in the year. The developer version, available next year, will be tethered to a Windows or Linux computer.