Investors, startups, and developers are having a festive day in Munich, Germany. AWE Europe AR+VR conference is well under way, bringing with it a few exciting announcements. One of the more interesting is the availability of Infinity Touch toolkit designed by Augumenta Ltd. This AR gesture toolkit is essentially bringing AR gesture interaction to Microsoft’s HoloLens headset.
‘There is a huge potential in AR’, Tero Aaltonen the co-founder and CEO of Augumenta. ‘But one of the things slowing down adoption has been the ability to interact in an intuitive way that requires no learning’. Words truthfully spoken. Although Augmented Reality has come a long way, seamless interaction is still a front to be tackled. Augumenta’s Infinite Touch AR Gesture Interaction solution, could be the answer. By using 3D Time-of-Flight cameras, the Augumenta toolkit enables users to simply point their fingers in order to interact with virtual objects. It is a dramatic, albeit logical, and a long way coming AR evolution.
For now, the only two devices that support AR gesture interaction are Microsoft HoloLens and Android smartglasses. But no doubt many more will be arriving in the near future, given the toolkit’s intuitive nature. Truly, easy to master, the finger pointing may be the simplest and most ingenious interaction method yet. No doubt developers will have a field day with it.
For Infinite Touch gesturing to work, HoloLens need a special ToF 3D camera built inside. The camera sensor reacts to gestures thus enabling the level of interactivity hitherto unknown on vanilla HoloLens. The company providing ToF cameras is PMDtec, whose VP Business Dev and Sales Mitchel Reifel announced that they ‘at pmd are proud that Augumenta has selected our development kit pico flex as their platform for ToF-based hand tracking’. Ah, yes, the pico flexx. It is the easy-to-use, ToF-based, relatively inexpensive development kit in form of a USB drive.
We mentioned developers. They are the ones the Infinity Touch is aimed at and are on the move now. Augumenta’s prime Infinity Touch demo during this week’s AWE was LudoCraft’s plane fighter. The game studio CEO Tony Manninen didn’t hold praises: ‘this newly available technology inspires us to create novel games that are intuitive to control and offer endless possibilities to play with the physical space’. Indeed, the AR gesture interaction toolkit form Augumenta can be a game changer in gaming industry.
Speaking of whom, Augumenta is an innovative house of technology from Finland. It is a software development company that specializes in smartglass operation and interaction. They boasts a network of over 250 companies who improved their business by teaming up with them.
‘Infinite Touch opens a new and exciting world for application developers’ Manninen again. AR gesture interaction is one of the things that AR was always gonna be about. The times are exciting and Infinity Touch toolkit is a huge stride towards a totally seamless and immersive AR experience.
