Technology

The World's First True Mixed Reality Headset, Made in India

Holoboard, Which Launches in September, is Anticipated to be Much Cheaper Than Its Silicon Valley Counterparts

28.08.2018 | by Kezia Parkins
Photo by Hloboard
Photo by Hloboard

India-based Tesseract, was founded by Kshitij Marwah, a former MIT design lab founder and winner of the Google prodigy award. Tesseract’s prime product, the Holoboard, a mixed reality headset is ready for launch and claims to disrupt the education, healthcare, creative and manufacturing industries.

The makers of the Holoboard are calling it the first true mixed reality experience headset. The headset works with any smartphone and projects images on a front visor that enhances the user’s visual experience. Users can see holograms around their immediate surroundings and interact with them using a handheld controller.

Holoboard’s basic model
Source: Holoboard

The curved glass visor gives users an 80-degree field of view, which makes holograms appear more realistic and enables a more immersive experience.

The headset also provides access to multiple apps simultaneously that can be placed in the user’s real-time environment. The user, for example, could be watching a movie on the headset, which would appear as a rectangle box in the real life. He could later pause the movie and attend a Skype call, without losing the movie’s images.

Multiple apps positioned in the real-time environment
Source: Holoboard

Unlike other augmented, virtual, or mixed reality headsets, the Holoboard harnesses the processor of the smartphone to power its functions. The headset uses an intricate overlay of its tracking mechanism, cloud-based artificial reality graphic transmission and holographic graphics to provide users with an interactive and fluid mixed reality experience.

According to the company, the basic model is probably the best option for most casual users; it’s also the only model compatible with both Android and iOS. The premium model is for a heavy-duty performance and is the is the only headset with a hand tracking module. The enterprise model is aimed at entrepreneurs and creative professionals who want to use the power of mixed reality to enhance their productivity.

Three models of the Holoboard
Source: Holoboard

Tesseract claims that the mixed reality experience will help educators along with doctors and medical students experience education in a whole different way — by using mixed reality headsets, users will be able to gain a deeper insight into their respective subjects while engaging in an experience that’s more fun and interactive.

Tesseract’s founder Kshitij Marwah was listed in MIT Technology Review as a Top 10 Innovator Under The Age of 35 (India). A Forbes 30 Under 30 entrepreneur, Marwah first learned about the basics of design thinking — an interdisciplinary learning program that enables designers, architects and engineers to come together to solve problems.

In 2012, he set up MIT Media Labs’ India chapter. This platform assisted aspiring innovators in learning about using design thinking as a tool to solve problems, along with getting access to future technologies to build solutions that could compete with the best in the world. What started with barely 50 people turned into a group of 20,000 innovators working together to create useful things for society.

Marwah and his team (all from the MIT Media Lab India Initiative) have also developed Quark 360—the world’s smallest 360 virtual reality camera.

Holoboard promises to be cheaper than its major competitors such as Google’s Oculus and Samsung’s Galaxy VR headset. The basic model has been priced at $149 dollars, whilst the premium and enterprise model go as high as $249 and $349, respectively.

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