Ever wanted to see your carpet change patterns right in front of your eyes? Well good news — thanks to miracles of modern technology, you can finally make it happen without eating a sheet of high-power blotter acid.
Using a modified Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and some clever software, researcher Renalto F. Salas-Moreno has developed a unique setup that can apply different patterns to your floor and other surfaces in your house. Practical? Definitely not — but it’s still pretty cool nonetheless.
The system consists of an Oculus Rift with an RGB-D camera mounted on top. This camera gives the device full color vision, and, with the help of some custom SLAM software, enables it to measure the contours of a given room to create a 3D map.
As the wearer looks around, the system is designed to spot large flat surfaces — things like bare walls, refrigerator doors, and even the floor. Once it detects these areas, the software treats them like big blank canvasses and populates the space with a bunch of digital images, all in real time.
Related: Put down those swatches! TapPainter lets you test colors with realistic virtual wall paint
Check out the video above to see it in action. As the wearer moves around, the world in front of him is augmented with all manner of different information — the carpet flashes between various patterns and textures, and cupboard doors magically become social media feeds.
If this technology becomes more sophisticated, maybe living in an empty apartment won’t be so bad in the future.
