This week we’ve seen two stories that illustrate how both Augmented and Virtual Reality are making big strides into the mainstream, and less geeky.
First, Lenovo & Disney are producing an AR Light Saber game to be in the stores in time for Christmas.
It sounds great — a headset that you put your phone into, and a ‘light saber’ unit that ‘works’ once you look at it through the your phone, with opponents to fight against providing the game elament. A brilliant use of AR, and with the Star Wars brand attached, this could really fly out of the stores. Watch out for YouTube videos of people using it, and takes of broken limbs and household objects (just like when the Wii came out).
Second, there are a couple of very mainstream ideas for TV shows in VR. Conde Nast has produced a show called Virtually Dating, where two people are scanned to become 3D avatars, and then sent into a VR date. In the first episode two people are sent to have a date on the moon. It’s been made for Facebook’s new Watch platform for original video. And it’s already had 3.3m views.
https://vrscout.com/news/vr-blind-dating-show/
Another show, also made by Conde Nast, but this time for Google Daydream, is called Supermodel Closets, and has celebrities like Kendall Jenner and Cindy Crawford showing fans around their closets (this one is best watched in VR).
https://vrscout.com/news/kendall-jenner-closet-vr-vogue/
It’s fascinating when tech starts to cross into the mainstream, and these examples may have the right ingredients to do it for both AR and VR.