The future of Nike design looks amazing in this concept video

With all the amazing real tech entering our lives, concept videos are becoming passé-- that is, unless the concept video uses existing innovations that simply haven't been combined yet.

That's the gist of a new video originally conceived by Nike and posted by Dell a few days ago showing off how designers might use augmented reality headsets like the Meta 2 to create next generation sports apparel.

The concept video shows several designers using the Dell Canvas (a touch display that connects to a PC) along with the Meta 2 headset to craft a version of the Nike Air Vapormax in augmented reality.

Added to the two other devices is an Ultrahaptics brand speaker array. It's a device that produces inaudible sound you can feel on your hands when you pass them in front of the array. In the video, the haptic touch aspect is meant to give the designer the ability to "feel" the virtual sneaker as it's being created.

I had a chance to try the Ultrahaptics device last month at the VRLA conference in Los Angeles and the textures the ultrasonic sound device mimics are fairly convincing. So while none of these technologies currently work together to accomplish what we see in the video, what you're seeing is all theoretically possible based on the very real, working components that are shown.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

"This is not about showing some [far in the future] concept, but showing what's possible today," Ryan Pamplin, vice president of Meta told me when I asked him about how the video was conceived. "All of this technically done with the hardware, it's just a matter of the software catching up with the hardware."

Nevertheless, it is still a concept at this point, which leads to the question: When are we likely to see the AR and haptics-assisted design process shown in the video become a reality?

"If you put the right people in a room together, you could have this in a year," says Pamplin. "This is a vision we all feel is realistic, and something to strive toward."