Comparing Cast AR to the Oculus Rift is interesting. The OR is regarded as having an advantage when full immersion is desired. The wide FOV and low latency of the OR work well together to reduce motion-induced nausea which has been one of the biggest impediments to widely adopted VR. Eye fatigue is likely to still be a problem with the Rift, however. I've experienced wide FOV VR with several hours of use with a Sensics system an it is a remarkably cool experience. However, full visual immersion still has some drawbacks in the user-interface and this can disrupt immersion or leads to a limited experience. Without very accurate hand/finger tracking, controls are best limited to a "HOTAS" (or HOMAK--Hands-On-Mouse-And-Keyboard) mentality. This creates a burden for the application designer, needing to create an abstraction of the control or environment that maps to the HOMAK/HOTAS input devices. A poor abstraction can be trivially accomplished, but a good controls abstraction requires some serious savvy. A Kinect type interface can simplify some of this in certain situations, but overall, the user is left grasping at air once the hands come off the main controls. And walking about with another player also in VR? Please empty the room of all obstacles and invest in some good body tracking software.What CastAR offers is a greatly simplified interface considerations with AR objects (and players!) that can match our real-world expectations. Need to move an AR game piece? Reach out, pick it up and place it where you want it. Need to flip some switches? Slide levers? Thump on a faulty needle gauge? Reach out and do it. Need to move from the pilot cockpit seat to the back-facing gunner's seat? Get up, turn around, walk to the other seat and sit down. Need to touch other players for some reason? Reach over and touch them. (Yeah, what games are there that have you touch another real-life player? None, yet, but if someone wants to develop one, CastAR is the obvious choice over any fully immersive HMD.)CastAR technology may beg us to redecorate our rooms with grey shiny cloth, but it won't ask us to rip ourselves out of the immersive environment just to find the mouse that fell on the floor, or to check on the odd sound that might be the cat coughing up a hairball, or because we've got an eye-fatigue induced migraine after 45 minutes of gaming. What CastAR is offering is something far beyond the simple and very limited world of HMD-based VR. It is offering to replace a great deal of user-interface mojo with naturally intuitive interactions. Immersion isn't just about visuals, it is about meeting a user's intuitive expectations instead of having to remember which keystroke accomplishes which simple actions. VR HMDs are to visuals what surround sound is to mono. But the applications CastAR has the potential to offer can break down the fourth wall and create accessibility to users far beyond immersive VR. CastAR will allow us to integrate the real world into our games, not as an intrusion on immersion, but as an augmentation to the game environment. (See what I did there?) Any software developers aiming strictly at VR are being short-sighted in the extreme.
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