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| BRIDGE |
IF YOU’VE BEEN holding onto your trusty
iPhone 6, 6S, or 7 and wondering when a cool VR headset will be available for
it, this is your lucky day. The Occipital Bridge headset looks like it’s well worth the
wait, as it’s more powerful than any other phone-driven headset on the market.
That’s because it’ll have
positional-tracking capabilities other mobile-driven headsets lack. The Bridge
comes from the same company that created the Occipital Structure
Sensor, an iPad and iPhone add-on that uses infrared to scan objects
and gauge distances automatically.
In fact, the Structure
Sensor is also the main component of the new Bridge AR/VR headset. It’s built
into the front of it, mapping your surroundings and making it possible to do
what’s called “inside-out positional tracking.” It can sense and create depth
maps of objects as close as a foot and a half and as far as 11 feet away. It
won’t drain your battery quickly, because the sensor has its own rechargeable
battery that runs three to four hours per charge.
Positional tracking is what
makes higher-end hardware such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR
such fundamentally different devices compared to phone-based headsets like the
Gear VR and Daydream View. With positional tracking, you can roam around inside
a virtual world laterally and vertically.
But positional tracking
usually requires an external camera or beacons to track your movement. Thanks
to its advanced built-in sensors, Bridge does it all in one self-contained
package. You just drop in an iPhone, and Occipital’s sensor rig is powerful and
accurate enough to create detailed 3D maps of your environment. It’s a big
deal.
It’s also a big rig. While
most headset makers are concentrating on making headsets softer, lighter, and
less intimidating, the Bridge makes you look like a full-on cyborg. You swing
out a door on the front of the headset, drop in your phone, close the door,
tighten the facemask onto your head with a knob on the back. The headset’s
120-degree wide-angle lens attachment and top-mounted Structure unit take it
from there.
Within a minute or so, you
can map your virtual surroundings just by looking at them. Occipital has
created a canned feature, a little robot pal called Bridget, that you can play
fetch with in your mixed-reality surroundings. Part of the Bridget experience
is the ability to create “portals,” little tears in the real-virtual continuum
that let you poke your head into computer-generated worlds.
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| BRIDGE |
As fun and friendly as
Bridget is, the platform’s longer-term success will depend on the work of
third-party developers. According to Occipital, the system works with existing iOS
VR apps and videos, while developers can use a Unity plugin and the existing
Bridge Engine SDK to create brand-new experiences.
There are a few notable
limitations to the hardware. For one, it only works with the iPhone 6, 6S, and
7—no Plus-sized models are supported at this time. And compared to those
higher-priced face-computers, it’s a fairly low-resolution experience. With the
Bridge on, you’re seeing a resolution of 640×480 per eye.
But the best part? It’s not
very expensive, especially compared to other positional-tracking systems and AR
devices such as the Microsoft Hololens. A developer-centric Explorer Edition
starts shipping this month for $500, while the consumer-oriented model is due
in March for $400.