Immersive 3D Without the Headset

The VR headset made a promise it keeps struggling to fulfill: step inside the content, reach out, and touch it. On paper, wonderful. In a hospital, a museum, or a showroom, the headset is the thing that gets in the way.

Ask the people who actually have to use them. A headset traps the experience on one person's face, so nobody else in the room can share it. It has to be donned, doffed, and disinfected between users, which no sterile or public workflow has time for. It disorients some people within minutes. And it's a cost per head that scales badly the moment you need more than one.

There's another way to get the reach-out-and-touch part without any of that. AirTouch adds gesture control to glasses-free 3D and mixed-reality displays, so people manipulate spatial content with their bare hands while everyone in the room sees the same thing on the same screen. Nothing to wear. Nothing to pass around. Nothing to sanitize between users.

What this unlocks

• Shared, not solo. A team can gather around a 3D display and collaborate, instead of taking turns inside a headset.

• Touchless and sterile-friendly. In environments where donning and doffing is a non-starter, there's nothing to don in the first place.

• Standard camera in, hands out. A normal camera watches the user; AirTouch's patented hand tracking turns their movement into control of the 3D scene.

Why the hands, specifically

Our whole thesis is that the interface you were born with beats the one you have to strap on. Gesture control lets a radiologist rotate an anatomy model, a curator drive an exhibit, or a designer walk a client through a product, all by hand, all without the headset tax.

If your 3D content currently lives behind a headset, it doesn't have to. See it running on a glasses-free display like the Sony Spatial Reality Display. Start a free trial.

Related: gesture control and hand tracking software, immersive and displays, and AirTouch on the Sony SRD.