Oculus founder thinks this wild anime film is the likely future of AR
Facebook's Oculus virtual reality unit has moved on from its founder, Palmer Luckey, but that doesn't mean that the guy who literally kickstarted the modern VR space is done thinking about the future of VR.
In an interview with Japan's MoguraVR, translated and surfaced by Road to VR, Luckey talks about the current state of VR and augmented reality (AR) at length. But things get really interesting when he mentions what he thinks is the best cinematic representation of AR currently available.
"The best portrayal of AR can be found in [the movie] Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale," said Luckey. "At the moment most AR devices are just about displaying HUD. On the other hand, the AR technology that appears in the theatrical version of SAO is closer to MR [mixed reality], and builds a virtual world based on reality."
The film, based on a series of Japanese Young Adult novels (called "light novels" in Japan) is set in the near future and depicts gamers who use a non-invasive brain interface called an Augma to engage in AR environments while competing in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Ordinal Scale. As with a lot of anime, despite the deceptively cute illustration style, the plot is high concept.
But is this really our AR future? If the founder of Oculus thinks so, it's at least worth taking a look at this glimpse of what might be our AR immersive reality in coming years.
