A startup says it can promote 6DoF tracked VR controllers for Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional referred to as Surreal Contact.
Surreal Interactive was based by Zhenfei Yang, who has eight years of expertise with SLAM pc imaginative and prescient expertise and tells UploadVR he previously led DJI’s total robotic pc imaginative and prescient group. Yang says his group at Surreal contains former Alphabet engineers who labored on Google Glass, Google Maps, and the Waymo self-driving automobile venture.
Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional’s gaze-and-pinch interplay system can really feel like telekinesis at occasions, and makes watching media and easy interactivity a breeze. However the lack of tracked controllers makes it unsuitable for a lot of sorts of video games and experiences playable on different headsets.
Surreal Contact is a self-tracking controller designed to resolve this downside. It makes use of two fisheye monitoring cameras and an onboard chipset to find out its place in area, much like Meta’s Contact Professional controllers however with one fewer digicam, and has the identical design and management components as Contact controllers together with two motion buttons, a thumbstick, an index set off, and a grip set off.
The startup is claiming lower than 10mm positioning accuracy. It describes this as “unparalleled monitoring”, an odd declare given Meta and Valve focused lower than 1mm for his or her VR controllers.
Surreal Contact is designed for use both standalone on Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional utilizing the startup’s upcoming SDK or for PC VR by way of the startup’s visionOS app Surreal Hyperlink, a fork of the open-source ALVR with additions resembling an interface for pairing the controllers. Yang tells us the native visionOS SDK is already being examined by Open Brush contributors engaged on a port.
The startup’s web site claims Surreal Hyperlink delivers “4K 120Hz SteamVR graphics”, an attention-grabbing declare provided that Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional’s shows do not assist 120Hz.
However barely questionable advertising and marketing apart, the Surreal Contact {hardware} itself seems to be very actual. Surreal has posted two demonstration movies on their YouTube channel displaying the controller getting used with Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional for Beat Saber and Half-Life: Alyx by way of an area gaming PC.
Yang tells UploadVR that Surreal plans to open preorders subsequent month, August, at which era the value might be revealed. As for a delivery timeline, he merely says his group is “assured in our capability” to ship Surreal Contact “promptly.”
After all, making a prototype of a {hardware} product is comparatively simple in comparison with mass-producing it affordably on time and at scale, and the previous ten years is suffering from VR startups with spectacular demos and assured claims that didn’t make this leap. But when Surreal can pull this off, it may make Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional and future Imaginative and prescient headsets viable for PC VR players.
