The CES’17 conference has now hit top gear and technological innovations are pouring in like there’s no tomorrow. Intel is also joining the party with the unveiling of something, we all know, the chipmaker had been aggressively working on for the past six odd months. There’s a question I need to address to you first — are you ready for a completely wireless AR+VR experience?
Intel has today taken the wraps off its first-ever Project Alloy headset, which is a standalone wireless wearable packing both augmented and virtual reality capabilities in the form of ‘merged reality.’ This means that you’ll not only be able to immerse yourself into a virtual world but also project some of that content directly into the real/virtual world as well.
The company has surely been working on the project day and night else they wouldn’t have been able to churn out a prototype, that was used on stage to show off the capabilities of the same. Project Alloy first saw the light of day at a developer conference in San Francisco in August last year. Now fast forward a mere 5 months and we already have the headset in hand for testing purposes.
This headset is the first standalone mixed reality headset to accomodate all of the tech, cameras, sensors, processors and battery required to provide an immersive experience. You are no longer required to be tethered to a heavy-duty gaming rig — which costs you some more bucks. Each Project Alloy headset will come packed with an Intel 7th-gen Kaby Lake processor, fisheye lenses, two RealSense cameras and a vision processor on the front. The backside of the headset will hold the on-device battery.
The company already has a strong foothold in the PC, wearable and somewhat in the smartphone ecosystem but it is now looking to go out on virtual escapades as well. With most of the technology in hand, Intel is trying to differentiate Project Alloy from other VR headsets from the likes of Oculus and HTC by providing a completely wireless experience.
In addition, Intel also showed off immersive experiences which were similar to those shown off at Oculus or Microsoft Hololens event. The demo showed two players wearing the headsets and playing a shooting game in the same virtual space at the same time. Speaking about the launch in the official blog post, Brian Krzanich, the chief executive of Intel Corporation, says,
The very definition of “reality” is changing. We are now developing what we call “merged reality” — in which the real world and the virtual worlds are seamlessly combined. I mean much more so than games like Pokemon Go. I mean Intel’s Project Alloy letting headset wearers use their real hands, rather than controllers, to manipulate virtual objects.
There is currently no information available on the pricing of the Project Alloy headset but it is expected to start shipping in the 4th quarter of 2017.
