Earlier this week VRFocus reported on hand-tracking specialist Leap Motion revealing work on an augmented reality (AR) headset dubbed Project North Star. Now there’s several more images and gifs to showcase Leap Motions ongoing development of the project.
Up until now Leap Motion has worked with several manufacturers to integrate its hand-tracking technology into various head-mounted displays (HMDs), including VRgineers upcoming enterprise-focused device and Qualcomm.
Whilst virtual reality (VR) headsets have been designed towards the consumer market, most AR devices are purely looking at business applications like Microsoft HoloLens and the Meta 2. AR in the consumer realm is virtually limited to smartphone applications thanks to the arrival of ARKit and ARCore.
Naturally Leap Motion’s AR HMD will incorporate it’s tracking technology to create an immersive, interactive experience for users. As you can see from these images and gifs, Project North Star is very much at the prototype stage, with a headset that’s fairly large in comparison to competitors. The company claims that this early design has a field-of-view of 95° x 70° with a 20 degree vertical (downwards) tilt and a 65% stereo overlap, with two 3.5-inch LCD displays having a resolution of 1,600 x 1,440 pixels for each eye.
With development ongoing Leap Motion has said it wishes to integrate additional features as eye-tracking, head-mounted light sensors, directional speakers, controllable screen transparency and actuators to dynamically move the displays.
Leap Motion has detailed its journey into headset development via its blog, “Although this is an experimental platform right now, we expect that the design itself will spawn further endeavors that will become available to the rest of the world,” writes Leap Motion’s co-founder and chief technology officer David Holtz.
Check out all the imagery below and for further details on Project North Star, keep reading VRFocus.
