The most common method of immersion in virtual reality at the moment is the use of special glasses and helmets. However, there are other ways of immersion — for example, projecting an image directly onto the retina of the eye or using volumetric image displays. The latter method is used extremely rarely since such screens need to be viewed strictly from a certain angle, but researchers from Canada have eliminated this drawback - they created a spherical display with 360-degree coverage.

The diameter of the crystal ball with the straightforward name "Crystal" is 60 centimeters. Four accurately calibrated projectors are used to create a spherical image. Two people can look at the projected image at once - thanks to light glasses, a different picture is shown to each of them. Users can walk around the ball and see the image from different angles, as the glasses constantly monitor their body position relative to the spherical display.

It is believed that the technology will find application in multiplayer games, 3D-modeling and video conferencing. Since the interlocutor is likely to use only one camera, his face will rotate around its axis depending on the position of the user - you will not be able to look at the back of the head.

One of the creators of the ball, Sydney Fels, explained that having released such a ball, they do not want to compete with virtual reality glasses. Their technology cannot completely replace them, and it will be interesting only to perform certain tasks. These include, for example, the aforementioned video conferencing and collaborative work on the creation of 3D-objects.

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