Technologists think that augmented reality is the next big thing that could replace smartphones, TVs, and all the screens in your life.
Alumni from Magic Leap, a hyped augmented reality startup, are now using the technology to create music and art pieces.
Their first work stars Marina Abramović and will premiere simultaneously to 50 people in London in February.
There are lots of challenges when recording a person in three dimensions, often called "volumetric capture," he explained. It usually requires an array of cameras, as many as 32, as well as a lot of care and time to put the images together in a way that can be placed into a real-world environment.
Other challenges include how colors are represented in augmented reality — red looks very different than, say, black, inside a headset that's based around displaying graphics inside transparent lenses. And each different augmented reality headset, like Hololens or ODG, also requires tweaks.
I was able to see a short preview of the Abramović piece on a Magic Leap One, although I was nowhere near London. Inside the smartglasses, you could see the artist, and although there were technological limitations including the headset's field-of-view, cutting off parts of the virtual people in frame, I felt her "presence" in the room with me — but I was just in a conference room in New York.