Canon is preparing to launch its MREAL Mixed Reality headset this month with a hefty $125,000 price tag and estimated $25,000 in annual maintenance. But the device is not intended for the typical consumer. Instead, it was designed for groups such as automotive manufacturers, research universities and museum display curators. The MREAL technology could also serve as a powerful tool for digital prototyping.

“As with Sony’s portable HDTV offering, the MREAL has two small displays sitting just in front of your eyes — and also like the Sony (and any similar technology, we’d imagine) certain images take some getting used to — particular those intended to be up close, with small writing (the dashboard of a car, for example),” writes Engadget. But “other, broader images, on the other hand, are immediately clear (e.g., a big flower bowl a foot away or a dinosaur down by your feet).”

Canon offered demos at a Manhattan event last week. In one demo, “a box decorated in QR-like codes opens to reveal a bouquet of virtual flowers. Touching them changes their color, as a bee buzzes around. You can open and close the box and move it around, and the graphics match up extremely well — the cameras only need to catch a couple of codes to generate the image,” explains Engadget. 

But even more impressive was the museum demo, according to the article. During it, “the table covered in codes becomes a Jurassic landscape. A small dinosaur wanders around your feet, while a giant predator lumbers off in the distance — it’s a little easier to suspend one’s disbelief here, but again, this isn’t a full-scale virtual reality device. Sadly, in the car and dinosaur demos, there’s no real interacting with the scenery — and in the former, wearers are required to put on brightly colored dishwashing gloves if they want to see their hands.”

Engadget details several notable demos in the article and offers compelling video and stills from the event.

“It’s easy to see how the MREAL could prove to be a powerful tool for digital prototyping — though that $125k price tag seems a hard one to justify if you’re not, say, Boeing. It’s also exciting to imagine just how such a tool might be utilized in a museum-like setting, and hopefully developers will take advantage of that SDK to develop some truly exciting applications for the technology,” concludes the article.