This Startup From India Introduced A Budget-Friendly AR Headset

There are some exciting announcements Reliance Jio had to make today, at the company’s Annual General Meeting. One of them is Holoboard, a new device, along with its demonstration. Holoboard is an AR (augmented reality) headset that Tesseract – a company from India develops.

Kshitijij Marwah, the founder of Tesseract, has developed the technologies of the innovative camera in the past. The technologies include a 360-degree camera for virtual reality called 'Methane' as well as 'Quark’ – a similar device for mobile phones. Previously, the company started to work on an AR headset that is currently available for consumers.

Holoboard – the cool new device – bears a resemblance to HoloLens developed by Microsoft. Holoboard is a self-contained augmented reality headset projecting holograms in front of users’ eyes on a display, which effectively lays out and projects virtual objects around users.

What makes Holoboard different from HoloLens is that Tesseract’s product makes use of your mobile phone camera alongside a custom application to work. The AR headset is lightweight; therefore, users can simply slide their smartphones in. Then, the headset projects virtual objects in a 90-degree view surrounding users by using built-in 3D mapping and tracking software as well as their phone cameras. Holoboard works on both iOS and Android devices.

The AR headset is anticipated to have a price of about Rs 10,000. Given that its cost is much lower, making the device a more viable product to consumers than the headsets introduced before it.

However, we still need to wait to see how well the device works.