Watch a Video of Canon's Mixed Reality in Action

Curious about Canon's mixed reality project? Well, the company has been running demos and Diginfo has recorded one of them.

The clip shows two gentlemen working in a fully digital space, manipulating objects, summoning menus and interacting with a digital car. From their perspective the objects are actually there, and each could see what the other one did. As far as augmented reality demonstrations go, it is quite impressive to watch.

The hardware is about as ugly as you could expect from a device that crams prisms, cameras and displays into something designed to mount over the head, but Canon still isn't targeting the consumer market. They are taking a slightly different approach: focus on industry, hoping that the potential makes it trickle down to the consumer level. The demos shown are all focused on industrial design, where a system like this could be more than revolutionary. Canon's tech would let designers not only see what their prototypes look like in real space, it might eventually let them design in three dimensions at full scale.

Also shown is a device for manipulating things in three dimensions, though I get the feeling that it hasn't seen as much development as the mixed reality headset.

Canon is managing to do something quite impressive here. In order for mixed reality to be immersive, the tech needs to have almost no latency between you moving your head and the object on screen moving. When you are dealing with advanced image capture, processing, and 3D rendering, you're talking about a lot of latency. Canon has apparently managed to avoid that.

The device is slated to go on sale soon, and Canon is prepping to release an SDK for developers.

Engadget