On our last day at CES 2014, we got to go hands-on with an early prototype of a most interesting pair of Augmented and Virtual Reality glasses. Currently in development, CastAR can project holographic-like 3D imagery right in front of you.

Louis Pasteur once said “chance favors only the prepared mind”. That quote is especially relevant to the story of how Technical Illusions' castAR Projected Augmented Reality glasses came to be. Co-founder Jeri Ellsworth is a hardware hacker, self-taught chip designer, and pinball machine expert. She was one of the first hires at Valve Software’s hardware lab, where she worked on some of the company’s wilder projects, including what eventually became the Steam Controller.

In May of 2012, while experimenting with “near-eye display” Virtual Reality (VR) technology, Jeri accidentally put an optical component in backwards, projecting the image out into the environment. At the same time, there just so happened to be a piece of retro-reflective material (the same stuff that makes street signs glow at night when your headlights hit them) in the lab, which the image was projected onto. When Jeri saw this, she experimented further and realized that projecting Augmented Reality (AR) content, instead of having it close to the eye, could solve a lot of the issues folks have with more traditional AR and VR concepts. While this discovery could be considered happenstance, it still took the right person to understand its true value. One with a “prepared mind”.

It then took another set of fortuitous circumstances to turn that discovery into a product you should be able to buy in 2015. Jeri continued to experiment with projected AR at Valve, building a series of prototypes, starting with the unwieldy, painful-to-wear, and appropriately named “head crab”.