Project North Star prototype well underway


Our in-office 3D-printed prototype for Leap Motion’s Project North Star has opened a new window into the various skills seen in the Quasar offices.

Project North Star was initially unveiled by Leap Motion in early April of 2018, and the project became open source a year ago. According to the Leap Motion website, “North Star is a full augmented reality platform that allows (users) to chart and sail the waters of a new world, where the digital and physical substrates exist as a single fluid experience.”

With the opportunity to delve into Augmented Reality so readily available, our Quasar team members were all too eager to jump on the change to interact.

Quasar’s Augmented Reality headset for Project North Star was mainly 3D printed in the Quasar offices with a few parts, such as the screens, purchased and shipped to our offices for assembly. Throughout this experience, we have successfully passed many milestones including but not limited to: assembling all necessary parts, connecting everything so the prototype is functional, and making the device wearable.

As our progress continues, our current focus is calibration and improving the video flow.

Our photos show our progress with the hardware and a bit of the software development that has gone into the project. Our three videos show our progress over the span of a single month once the device was functional and wearable. As shown, we have progressed from the basics of Augmented Reality interaction to providing a visual example of how users might be able to one day visualize, interact, and thus better understand star clusters (the data used and seen in the video for this star cluster example comes from ESA’s Gaia mission).

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