Popular Mechanics Features Project BlueShark and the MxR Lab at ICT

Published: March 20, 2014
Category: News

A feature story on virtual reality included an interview with ICT’s MxR Lab Director Mark Bolas and a demonstration of Project BlueShark, ICT’s collaboration with the Navy that uses virtual reality to imagine the workspace of the future.
“The primary goal is breaking time and space,” Bolas said in the article. “You can virtually teleport someone in there from shoreside” to collaborate on tactics, for instance, states the story.
The article highlighted the MxR Lab’s work in virtual reality head mounted displays, including low-cost DIY versions and the Wide5 HMD, a headset with a 150-degree field of view that Bolas and Ian McDowall started developing around 2005. The story also notes the lab’s experiments in redirected walking, which allows a fixed space to become much larger in the virtual world, and mentions that Palmer Luckey, founder of the Oculus Rift, worked in the military-funded lab.