Adjusting Home Lights in Mixed Reality

Mixed reality is slowly transforming our lives by blending the real and virtual worlds, improving how we work, learn, and interact. More interesting concepts appear every day, and today I've brought you an especially useful one.

What if you could easily turn your lights at home on and off? Technical artist Thomas Ratliff presented a cool idea that does just this. He managed to switch on the light and adjust its intensity with a simple pinch gesture – all with Meta Quest 3's Passthrough feature, which allows you to see your surroundings behind the virtual reality.

"It should totally be a default feature on headsets to control smart devices in your home," Ratliff said, and wouldn't it be just awesome? He used Quest's scene management to anchor to the lamp and manually adjusted it to get the impressive result in the video. And all of this magic was possible thanks to the developer API from Govee, a company providing smart home appliances and lights.

This is not the first time Ratliff impressed us with his creativity. He also demonstrated a video player with real-time lighting and reflections set up in mixed reality with Unity, and it looks awesome.

What else can you do in MR? Well, there is a lot to choose from as numerous experiments suggest. You can learn how to play guitar by looking at virtual chords right in front of you or play games (and there are many of them).

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