I toured through the website for Portal for the first time this week. The product debuted last year, and the whole website for the device reads like Facebook put a mirror up to itself and had trouble figuring out how to explain what it saw. The gadget is supposed to help you video chat with your contacts, but there’s a whole section of the product site dedicated to privacy. There is a physical cover you can place over the device’s camera when you don’t want a palantir-like glass eye staring into your room all the time and there’s a red light, too, that comes on when you a press a button to physically disconnect the camera and microphone from the rest of the device’s electronics.
If Portal and Quest could communicate automatically to deduce their locations relative to one another, then you’ve got yourself most of the way toward an auto-calibrated mixed reality studio. For the player in an Oculus Quest — at any given moment they should be able to activate mixed reality on the nearby Portal and show everyone in the room exactly what they are doing.