Hololens pre-orders starting tomorrow, ships in 30 days
mspoweruser.com
mspoweruser.com
...And then I see mention of Skype, which is a product that -- since its acquisition by Microsoft -- has gone steadily downhill in terms of its form, functionality, stability, security, and essentially every other metric. It's hard to find anybody who doesn't loathe it. There's some serious cognitive dissonance in trying to contemplate Hololens and Skype simultaneously.
Actually, I had the same reaction when Hololens was first announced. "OMG, the future is here! Thank you Microsoft!" I thought, and then immediately spent the next 6 hours tracking down an idiotic standards-compliance bug which existed in every version of Internet Explorer up until IE 11.[1]
I could go on at some length, but suffice to say that I am routinely astonished by Microsoft's R&D capabilities, yet virtually every interaction I have with their actual software leaves me with a dire impression. (Except for Excel, which for some reason Just Works for me). So as much as I want to have high hopes for Hololens, I fear that crappy software will let it down.
Please, Microsoft -- prove me wrong!
1: window.location.origin, if you really want to know.
With VR, I think work on depth cams and software to "stitch" together data streams from multiple devices will become very important. It's one of the only ways you can currently record and transmit (admittedly low-quality in current iterations) actual 3d video that can be viewed from any angle.
When you look at early low quality webcams compared to digital video today, then apply that to something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghgbycqb92c
you can see how it opens up the possibility of real VR movies (not just pano) and even VR telepresence.
However, Skype for Business (formally known as Lync) is rock solid.
I would postulate that since the rebranding of Lync, the old consumer-Skype is on an end-of-life roadmap.
Hololens + LyncSkype in an enterprise & smb setting makes a lot of sense.
The games:
- Fake Fighter 2 Turbo - Project Fake Racing - FakeZilla - Fifa Fakeball 2009 - Tony Hawk's Fake Skater 9
Nonsense, $3000 is peanuts compared to the costs to actually write anything for it. I.e. if you are expecting to be entertained by the device and not augment your creative or professional output by it you are probably not in the core market. I have no idea how it will turn out but it's not a VR helmet as such, it's a wearable HUD with AR capabilities.
To the opposite of Kinect, a LOT of tech journalist and enthusiast tried hololens. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with only issues about the field of view being raised. I personally tried Hololens, I was blown away by the technology. I own an Oculus Rift DK2 and I tried the unreleased consumer version of oculus rift. They are both great technology, and Oculus clearly offer a more immersive gaming experience, but I personally saw more potential with hololens, and generally speaking I thought the technology was cooler. Anyway, if you are genuinely interested, you should definitely try to get at any of the event where they allow people to try it out.
People are singling out Microsoft here, but seemingly forget all of the promises Apple and Google are always making, when Google had to can Glass and Apple can't even get Airdrop to work correctly.
That's why you look at track record to assess behavior. If it happens once, you can forgive it as optimism or somesuch. If it's a pattern, you would then need to assume it's deliberate.
I'm not here to say that MS doesn't have people doing bullshit marketing powerplays like the one you described. But in the console market, that's pretty much how the business works.
And in the larger PC market, you've got 3 realistic options and they're all frustrating in one way or another.
The AR side is equivalent of taking a 6" phablet and holding it at arms length: that dinky rectangle is your augmented viewport.
It doesn't do anywhere near a full AR on everything everywhere you look.
It's also telling, that my previous post in this article was modded down pretty hard. a few of us went to Chicago to demo this, and I was sorely unimpressed. And the AR was only one facet. The bigger problem is their choice of active scanned IR.
They mentioned that their new API will to geocode everything you scan with GPS points, reference points (wifi) and other ways of triangulation. And those points will be linked to Lat/Lon. That sounds exciting and scary both... but with failure to adapt to that huge glowing ball of wideband radiation means the Hololens is a fail outside or near windows.
I guess that leaves the basements to us?
Do they "conveniently" upload all this to "the cloud" too?
My guess is that yes, they would sync to MS local maps of your environments. It would make a great deal of sense, as that's where Google has a huge hole in on their maps service. It would put MS on the "map", literally and figuratively.
Almost all tech journalist that tried it were blown away by the experience. Most of them mentioned the field of view issue, but I haven't read anyone saying that it was such an issue that it made the technology any less impressive.
You can expand that quote from [programming languages] to everything and it remains equally true. There's very few things everyone uses that they don't spend at least some time complaining about.
There's also quite a nice round table video with some of the original authors 30 years on. [2]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rid26/we_are_the_mic...
[2] http://www.geekwire.com/2015/recalc-or-die-30-years-later-mi...
I'll admit I'm hesitant to speak more bluntly, but I'm sure you can inferr what I'm trying to imply from the above; namely, it'll to be seen once holo comes out which org it was in, metaphorically :). If you were looking for a comparison, destiny probably has more predictive ability in terms of dev patterns, since the studios I believe (may be talking out of my ass) had a hand in making both.
I'm also very excited about holo, a bit sad though that they didn't really make dev kits available internally to anyone who wasn't on the direct team; or even with a meaningful enough discount to make it viable to me as a hobby project.
I fear that the limited field of vision will severely cripple the experience.
To me the killer app for these would be football replays and extra overlays beyond TV.
I hope this is eliminated in future versions. The Epson Moverio has this issue too and it is very awkward seeing a rectangle of available AR. I haven't tried the Hololens yet but I hear it is still there.
p.s. The Virtual Reality NYC meetup is actually hosted inside Microsoft each month. They have given any talks or demos on the Hololens since I have been going. I hope this will change with this announcement!
When faced with this, it looks like they went with limited FOV in order to keep it standalone and relatively ergonomic. I think this makes sense because processing power and software will continue to improve and allow wider FOV with equally good performance. They just chose to keep the ergonomics and lower the FOV in these early units to keep performance good. With better chips and software, wider FOV will be akin to raising the resolution on a game when you get a new video card.
My mind is just blown with the possibilities of a software-layer on our real world, slowly growing from this initial piece of hardware. I want to be a part of this.
And then they put THAT picture, with the selling-point being games, 3D tours and Skype. This is just horrible.
Do they even care?
People lose focus, even through video interaction. How incredible would it to be to walk through an office and interact with colleagues, that simply aren't there (not an American Psycho reference. They are there, any you can see and talk to them in the physical whole, they're simple not _physically_ there).
How would this change things? Initially, perhaps not a lot, 10 to 15 years out. Physical interaction would still be deemed prime. And this vision is sans-headset (office decoration firms get busy preparing multiple remote sites). Beyond that timeframe, would it be so normal to have a strong business relationship with someone never physically met? What would be the impact of 'hanging out' over lunch to develop relationships. That seems a bigger challenge.
But to put that in perspective, it is only 400 years since Shakespeare's death, that's 10 generations of people that live until 40, or more realistically around 7 generations of hereditary lifespans where the youngest generation is in physical/educational contact with the eldest generation. That's not a long time for transfer of ideas for revolutionary ideas to happen.
Will we all be on a tropical beach developing VR apps? No. Old nature dies hard. This is an augmentation, not a replacement.
Would be a great opportunity for lower cost, more focused product to be "good enough" instead of being overly ambitious but out of reach for most people.
I don't think you appreciate how difficult that use case is and it ends up being the same level of difficulty as doing basically anything else in AR.
Well it is, that's basically what ScopeAR does, but they use 3D based markers and animated objects.
The Hololens video however is showing that the new element (circle something) is being "glued" to the object without a specific image tag - which means you have to have both an accurate scan of the environment and 3D object glued to it. Very hard to do.
Funny, they show football players, all I can see is future generals guiding their troops in the field with this.
This to me, is a much bigger failure point with the way the Hololens is implemented. It's also a great deal harder to fix. (Mainly, they need a visual SLAM on stereo-cameras, similar to what we've been hearing about the MagicLeap.)
I've used a Hololens, yes the FoV is off-putting, but the technology itself is incredible. If I had $3K to throw around, or if I were a big enterprise looking to invest for various research using Hololens, I'd say it would be worth it.
> catch-up
So... never?
Wow. I'm a 23 year old Software Engineer living in the Bay Area and making six figures. I have plenty of disposable income yet I still find this expensive. If they aren't targeting me, who are they targeting? I don't think a senior executive at an Investment Banking firm will develop apps for their prototype in his free time.
They must be targeting businesses? It is a Developer Edition after all.
The price point is designed to stop people like yourself grabbing it thinking it's going to be a full experience day 1.
But it's cheap enough where anyone who'll be in the position to develop anything of quality to grab it without thinking twice.
A long time ago I was interested in applying Echelon LonWorks devices for a completely different market than they serve. But their development kit cost tens of thousands of dollars[1] for a $100 worth of parts and their development software. So screw that.
To take another example, Broadcom is simply impossible to talk to directly if you're after something as simple as the documentation and a library to access the API on one of their chips. You have to speak to idiot manufacturer's reps, who'll pass on your inquiry to Broadcom if they deem you a worthy customer. The only language a manufacturer's rep understands is the dollar value of the order you plan to make within 3 months for which they'll get a cut. They don't give a damn about wild new ideas or applications you might have if it doesn't translate into immediate large-volume orders for them.
The stated reason for all this BS is that the companies want really serious customers because of the demands and questions imposed by the developers. If that's the really the case, they should have 2 pricing tiers: cheap but no support, and expensive with access to support. But I don't think it's the case; I think it's just the usual big company delusion that they should speak only to important customers and all deals must be big deals.
[1] Their kits seem to be "only" $2-3K now. http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/echelon-corporation...
Why would the target market for a augmented reality device be "young college grad with a lot of money"?
I think the fact that this has gaming applications is tangential to what it actually is - a business productivity tool with a core feature set around product design and collaboration.
will it _require_ Skype?
https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/1015392929212465...
When I demoed it months ago, it was so not ready for primetime. The AR area was pathetic, and it used IR lasers for scanning.
The AR area is self-explanatory: when the size is not much bigger than a postage stamp, your project makes a great tech demo, and a really shitty customer product.
The IR laser is problematic in multiple ways:
1. If it's the same module as found on the kinect, it's a 90mW laser, which is a hell of a lot of power on a battery platform. Expect much reduced power in scanning mode.
2. IR means the device is useless outdoors and near windows. Think of anyplace where the Kinect fails: so too will this.
I'd pay $1000 for this, not the $3k they're asking. The tech just isn't there. I just hope this doesn't cause an AR desolation in the community the way VR had done for 10 years.
And so the high price works exactly as intended. Microsoft KNOWS that this isn't ready for prime-time, so they put this price tag on it to make sure that it isn't buyed by someone just enthusiastic who is then dismayed when it is "not ready for prime-time" (as advertised!). They've stated multiple times that this is the reason for the price tag.
IR scanning is inherently erroneous. I simply can't be:
1. Outside 2. Near windows 3. Near IR flood sources 4. Reflective/glass areas
It just doesn't work on any of those areas. That's the huge unsolvable problem with this platform. And no, frequency shifting to a different wavelength still has the same problems (the sun is a great wideband emitter).
Even if their platform was brought to the best their hardware could bear, it still would fail.
EDIT: For those of you giving -1's, how about you comment and explain why you are doing so. I'm providing a technical argument why this platform will fail, based on my experiences with this headset and my work in computer vision.
Unsolvable problems tend to be unsolvable. I can solve this with three words: Use it inside. And on the next version (which, let's be honest, they're targeting a "next version" for general release, not this one), they use lasers instead of IR.
If you want to use it outside, it might be unsolvable for the current release, but it's hardly unsolvable for the platform.
They're already using "lasers". The problem with using any sort of structured light is that your frequency can't be in the same band of any sort of flood lights (sunlight, ballasts, IR camera lights). It's also why X-Rays work well: it's a structured light (kind of) and can be used because we won't have a flood of XRays everywhere.
The problem isn't with "IR": they should not be using a structured light solution. It's just not durable enough for 3d scanning applications. It's also why I've worked on a SLAM-like 3d scanner. Understanding geometry, corners, edges, and gradients are much more versatile in scanning, because it is passive. Our very eyes don't send out beams of light, and yet we manage a very accurate SLAM-like map inside our own heads.
The problem with the Hololens is that until they switch to a vision-only system, they're going to be plagued with problems regarding IR sources (or whatever freq they choose).
Source: me (3Dollar scanner, amateur radio operator, OpenCV reprap implementer)
During my master internship at INRIA, a coworker had to put a tablecloth on his desk to be able to get a proper depth image with a Kinect. It turned out to be a small window, 5 meters away, reflecting on his desk. Indirect sun light was enough to mess up the projected pattern.
So "Use it in a cave" can be a solution, but it's... less attractive.
Funny fact is, Hololens doesn't work with windows.
Seems a bit steep. Hopefully this doesn't represent the retail price.
Google Glass was a notification system that sits above-ish your one eye.
Holo Lens is trying to be full AR.
I guess hololens will "fail". A few big companies will buy them and develop random software to impress clients. But i'm pretty sure we will not see much else.
When I play games I want to get OUT of my reality. I don't want every game being painted onto my lounge room.
It might be a great experience if you have a lounge room as stylish and clean and spacious as Bill Gates or Satya Nadella, but I have a small cluttered lounge room and I have no interest in playing games projected into that reality.
I'm holding a fistful of dollars which I am trying to throw at Sony as soon as they'll take it from me for immersive VR.
VR is becoming huge and so far they have no product in the game.
"Mobile is the next phase of VR, and augmented reality, also known as mixed reality, is the third phase, said (Piper Jaffray analyst Gene) Munster."
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/07/welcome-to-the-future-virtual...
And honestly, I think they're on to something. Using an HTC Vive with the tilt brush app really emphasises just how intuitive 3D design work can be in VR. The robot repair demo features a really eye-opening moment when you're looking into the innards of an exploded-view robot. It's such an intuitive way to work with 3D models, and so obvious that it will eventually become commonplace.
The biggest problem with the Vive demos is that you're fully immersed. Hololens addresses that.
video:
I think, just like watching a movie at home, it's fairly easy to get immersed and "lose yourself" if it's engaging. Not that I'm uninterested in something totally immersive like you mean, just think there's room for both.
For $3000 now days you can visit half the world.