Tachi toys

The image at the right, which is making the rounds near the top of Blogdex and Daypop, is cool enough on its own. But some of the other augmented reality projects at Tokyo University’s Tachi Lab are also intriguing. Take, for example, a machine that creates virtual haptic spaces. I can’t imagine this works very quickly, but it would make an immersive version of Quake pretty cool. But winning the prize for technology I’d be most likely to play with is the saccade based display. I want one of these for my office door. I wonder how bright it would have to be. Along with eye-tracking you could do some pretty interesting stuff with this. I’ve thought about making a “magic wand” by disassembling one of those clocks and hooking it up to an accelerometer, but never really got around to it. That would still be a fun project, but just using saccade is also pretty neat. A display that only works when you aren’t looking at it :).