Leap Motion open-sources North Star AR headset design and guide

Back in April, Leap Motion announced Project North Star, a next-generation augmented reality headset that the company said could be produced for $100 at scale. Today, Leap Motion announced it is open-sourcing North Star’s design and assembly guide under an Apache license, giving interested users and developers the ability to build their own AR headsets — a step that could advance AR’s role in productivity and PC gaming.

The headset’s specs are intended to be modern rather than basic, most notably including two 1600 x 1440 pixel translucent but bright screens running at 120 frames per second. As the screens are large and angled outwards, they permit a 100-degree field of view — greater than some existing AR headsets — while an integrated hand and finger tracker covers a wider 180-degree area. Accompanying software enables hand motions to serve as an input interface for a tethered computer, manipulating and interacting with computer-generated AR objects.