Gyroscopic Ring Interface for Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) — overlaying information in your field of view — appears to be on the cusp of being a viable everyday technology. Today, it’s easy enough to place data inside your field of view, but what this data represents, and how you interact with it will determine whether it’s something extremely useful, or just another distraction for you to ignore and set aside.

To this end, Nat Martin has developed a prototype AR interface device, using a gyroscopic ring to decouple hand gestures from any head-mounted camera. This allows interaction without raising your hands into the camera’s field of view, and even pointing at things as a sort of virtual laser pointer. Along with the gyroscope, the prototype has a scrolling sensor operated by one’s thumb, and a touch sensor to tell if the index and middle fingers are together.

Martin has constructed a wired prototype of this device, and made an aesthetic model of the ring with cast brass. The video below is rendered to show what this type of interaction would look like when fully implemented.

In addition to the purely technical aspects of this build, Martin also studied how people think about objects in space around them. This can relate to how events in the future are perceived, or even where different people fall in your mind’s natural orientation. By aligning AR with this natural orientation, the hope is that this can lead to more intuitive interactions.

The expanded video seen here provides more background on the ring’s development.

[h/t: deezen]