Tucked away in a far corner of E3 was a small booth. Booth 2662 to be exact, and for most people, that is all they knew about Holoneer, the booth number. Even after any given gamer saw what Holoneer had to offer, they probably walked away thinking that it was lame or even uninteresting. Not this guy.
Holoneer, a Jersey City, NJ based company, was demonstrating their motion capture ability. All done with an Algorithm. No markers, no assistance, all rendered in real-time with off-the-shelf components.
To be fair, Holoneer was in the wrong place at the wrong time. At E3, their motion capture and processing technology would at best be treated with a yawn and the question: ‘Cant I just get this from a (insert motion gaming peripheral here)?’ Where they belong is Summercon, CES, Computex, and Defcon.
Brad Wilk and Emre Dulhos of Holoneer showed us their technology, and until you realize that they were processing 3D gestures, ON THE FLY, with a $50 Walmart-special-camera, you would never think that what they were doing would be so amazing. What takes 2 cameras and and IR camera for the Xbox Kinect to do, or a camera, accelerometers and visual ques (the glowing balls) for the PlayStation Move to do, Holoneer can do with no more than one camera and algorithm wizardry.
What I saw when I looked at the Holoneer setup was a way for even the most basic of tablets to suddenly support 3D gestures without any hardware modifications. Even some of our oldest tablets could now process our interactions in 3 dimensional space.
I certainly wish this company the best of luck, and if you are interested in tinkering around with their stuff, you can sign up for the SDK once it is released. I would like to see some of you get this bad boy working on android so we can make this dream a reality.
Website- http://www.holoneer.com/