Disney wants you to be immersed in Star Wars this fall as The Last Jedi film comes out in December. And one of the ways it is doing that is with Star Wars: Jedi Challenges, an augmented reality headset that makes you feel like a Jedi.
I tried it out in a hands-on demo, and it worked better than I thought it would. It wasn’t a purely gimmicky experience, the way that many AR demos feel. The product debuted on November 3 in Best Buy Stores or the Lenovo web site. Disney is heavily advertising it on TV. It isn’t cheap at $200, and so it’s an expensive toy for the Star Wars kid in all of us.
Lenovo makes the headset and Disney designed the AR experiences, combining both animated software with brand new hardware, said Mike Goslin, vice president of development at Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media, in an interview with GamesBeat. He said the team pulled together a mix of game designers, theme park creators, and AR experts to build the device over the past two years.
“We didn’t find a device out there that was a perfect fit, so we chose to create our own,” Goslin said. “We felt that AR was a great way to deliver the visuals. We wanted it to be immersive, but mass market. It had to be affordable and comfortable.”
The device is a lot more affordable than it might have been because it uses your smartphone as a screen. But when you slide your iPhone or Android phone into the headset, it is flipped up, and a mirror captures the images for your eyes.
This way, you can see the animated imagery as well as the real world in front of you. The device blends both the real world and the animated world to produce the AR entertainment for your eyes.You can see the real world as it is, so there is no lag, as you have in other devices that use a…
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