Ex-Valve employee starts Kickstarter campaign for 3D AR and VR headset

Jeri Ellsworth, who many will remember was formerly in charge of Valve’s attempts at an Oculus Rift-styled virtual reality headset, has started a Kickstarter campaign to help crowdfund her latest endeavor: castAR. As described by the Kickstarter page, castAR is a projected augmented reality system that displays holographic-like 3D projections right in front of you.

In its entirety, castAR consists of glasses, the Magic Wand and an RFID Tracking Grid. The Magic Wand is a controller that lets you position things in space and control them with a joystick, and the tracking grid allows you to uniquely identify, track and augment physical objects on the surface. The tracking grid has a bunch of application some of which include tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: The Gathering, which either require cards or miniatures at defined places in the game’s space.

The frames of the castAR glasses contain two micro-projectors—one for each eye. Each projector casts a perspective view of a stereoscopic 3D image onto a surface. A camera between the projectors scans for infrared identification markers placed on the surface, which can be used by the camera to precisely track your head’s position and orientation. This lets the in-built software adjust the holographic scene accordingly. The glasses get their video signal through an HDMI connection. The camera is connected via a USB port on the PC.

The surface, referred to earlier as the RFID Tracking Grid, is made of retro-reflective sheeting material, which means that it can bounce the majority of light from the projectors directly back towards the glasses with little scattering. This allows the simultaneous use of a single surface by multiple users, while at the same time keeping each viewer’s view private from the others.

The Kickstarter campaign is asking for a total of $400,000. With less than a day gone by, it already has more than 1,000 backers with $263,313 pledged.