Microsoft's HoloLens and the future of luxury car buying | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's HoloLens and the future of luxury car buying

cnet.com

16 pointsMarlonPro9 comments

Strikes me as a combination of (a) gimmick, and (b) solution in search of a problem. How far are you really going to get through the car-buying process without being able to see a physical vehicle?

This technology may have its uses, but selling cars isn't one of them.

Not just luxury car buying. I've been convinced for a while that AR and/or VR will be the future of almost-anything-buying. It's one significant disadvantage to buying things online now: you get way more choice, but it's often difficult to be really sure what something will be like, going only from 2D pictures and a text description. And in some cases - clothing in particular - even if you have exact specs and great images of the item itself, it isn't terribly useful without context. (Cars would fit in that category too.) With VR though (and help from 3d cameras and body mapping), shopping for clothes online could be a better experience than in person. You could virtually try on 10 shirts faster than you could get into a fitting room in the real world, and see them from arbitrary angles as well. Or take furniture. Rather than looking at pictures, how about seeing exactly how that side table will look in your living room? The possibilities are endless.

Admittedly until we get true "virtual reality" you won't be able to tell how a pair of pants or a couch or whatever actually feels, nor will you really be able to virtually test drive a car (which as the article suggests is a pretty significant part of the buying process) but it will still be a completely different world from e-commerce today, and in many ways better than shopping in brick and mortar stores, even aside from the convenience of not leaving your home and the infinite selection of the internet.

I'd like to see some non-fake pictures of what you see through Microsoft's device. Remember, it cannot darken anything; it can only add light. Yet their demo videos clearly show dark virtual objects against a lighter background. That's fake.

Applications will either require a dim room, or will be bright shiny lines on top of the background.

I agree that Microsoft would have push well beyond the established best of AR technology in order to darken things in the hololens, but I can't tell what's likelier: that they're totally lying in their demonstrations, or that they have kept some bit of truly state-of-the-art-advancing innovation a secret.

It would be very easy to lie, but it is also difficult to believe that Microsoft would bet so hard on selling this product as revolutionary when it provides a fundamentally weak experience.

So Animats, is there something concrete that you're basing this claim off of, or just a general knowledge of AR technology and its limitations? I genuinely want to know--I've spent a lot of time wondering about this, and I've seen good points on both sides.

For anyone curious, Abrash does a great job of explaining why darkening is so hard here[1] and this reddit-speculator[2] does a great job of highlighting some incidents where hands-on hololens reviewers specifically noted "dark projection" during their user tests.

I've heard that the field of view is smaller than videos make it appear, and also that the image it displays is not fully opaque, but nothing that suggests that they can't darken. If it turns out they can, it would be a pretty big deal, and if it turns out they can't, hololens may be a dud.

[1] - http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-... (3.5 years old)

[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/HoloLens/comments/30koy9/hololens_a... (7 months ago)

Reviews [1][2] indicate that 1) Microsoft won't let reviewers take a picture of what the device really shows, and 2) the demos seen by the reviewers aren't nearly as good as Microsoft's videos. Microsoft has made progress in getting the weight down, and the tracking is apparently good enough.

[1] http://www.techradar.com/us/reviews/wearables/microsoft-holo... [2] http://www.digitaltrends.com/vr-headset-reviews/microsoft-ho...

Hm, I may have been unclear -- I didn't mean to question your claim that Microsoft is not showing us real pictures/video, as they clearly are not.

I was (and am) curious about the ability to display darkness, which you specifically claimed the hololens cannot do, and it sounded as though you knew so for sure.

Every indication from hands-on demos is that it can actually display black, which is surprising and impressive, but no one I've seen has _explicitly_ said so, so it may still turn out to lack that ability. I'd love to find out :)

The primary difference that seems to be reported between videos and demos is (as told in your links and mine) that the field of view is extremely limited, which is understandable, but does make the videos misleading.

Anyway, thanks for the links!

When our team tried it, it looked like it displayed a very dark grey - if not necessarily black.

So, you are going to spend a significant amount of money on a luxury car and, somehow, you don't have the willingness to go there in person actually experience the car and you settle with a simulation?

That's a lot of enthusiasm.

Our company can do this today free to everyone worldwide with markerless 6DOF AR on an iPad/iPhone. Just need the 3D model of the car. Don't even need to go to a showroom, you can do it in your driveway.

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