Hacker News Reader

Comment by daveguy | Hacker News Reader

What I got from the video:

The gaphics integration into the real world is phenomenal. If you put a virtual object in a room you can walk around it. If you put something on a wall it stays there no matter where you walk.

Unfortunately, the interface -- how you interact with virtual objects -- is completely janky. Awkward pinching gestures to select keys from a floating virtual keyboard. Cursors that are supposed to represent your physical movement, but instead jump around.

It is tantalizingly close, but it seems like it would be just as annoying as it is neat or useful until someone comes up with a better (simple and reliable) interface.

View on HN

Also the fox runs through objects that are even slightly complex, as it can't comprehend their depth (the camera woman).

Another interesting depth issue is when it ran to the back of the table and straight on to the floor as if they were continuous, because the view angle made it so the table and floor were right next to each other only separated by a line, so the fox didn't do a jump animation. I suspect a depth map of the room needs to be constructed to solve that issue, no mean feat.

These kind of issues just show me this tech is still years away from being what we'd expect.

Good points. I was most impressed with the wall identification/ interaction. If you sent up a big empty room, then everything could be VR, except with a concept of where the ends are. So it would be a walkable immersive environment. But I agree, it is not to the point where the average consumer would be happy. Or they would probably be happier with a much cheaper standard low-quirk vr headset.

If you sent up a big empty room, then everything could be VR, except with a concept of where the ends are.

That, plus the collaboration features would make HoloLens pretty awesome for any kind of collaborative product design. Take cars, for example. Right now, car mockups are done in clay, and while clay is easier to mold than metal, it still takes time and limits your ability to iterate. But with Hololens, you can have a design review where each of the participants puts on an AR unit, and now you can all see the same car and make changes to it in real time.

I'm excited to see what sorts of applications will be opened up by being able to display virtual objects in a "real" setting. I also agree that this won't be consumer-facing technology (at first). This is the sort of thing that'll take off with architects and engineers before it takes off with "normal people".

Hmmm... Kinect creates a depth map. Not sure why they didn't use the same technology.

It does, you can see it in the first video (it appears to be quite more than a depth map and actually extracting geometry from it, which fits with what the SDK news has been).

Pure speculation, but I would bet that it generates the room geometry at startup and then doesn't change it later. The device has limited processing power and needs to hit a high frame rate, so doing that makes sense.

A person walking into the scene wouldn't be accounted for in that case. It's also dependent on scans of the environment and the quality of geometry reconstruction, so things like a gap between objects that you didn't see from a good angle could easily run into that issue.

This is incorrect -- it does constantly rescan the room and will detect someone moving through the environment. It doesn't do that super quickly, though, and it can be difficult to capture the geometry of a moving person accurately.

Conker can handle complex objects, but they have to have been present when scanning the scene; my cameraperson was moving around so she didn't get scanned.

The depth maps can get dynamically updated, so it's not insurmountable, but currently the process seems to take a few seconds. I'm not sure if this is a design decision, a processing limitation, a hardware data capture limitation, or something else entirely.

I think there are two fundamental reasons it's "janky":

1. It's version 1.

2. It's an interface that nobody's used before.

Neither of these is a mark against the technology.

Go ask a caveman to use a version 1 iPhone, and see if he falls in love with it or just trash-talks it on an internet forum.

But the iPhone did not require you to "step inside" of it. There's a whole world of difference in the threshold for "good enough" between a device you hold in your hand and one that you put on your head, overlaying your whole view. With a smartphone, you can still go all xkcd:303 during periods of waiting. Head mounted? Not so sure that works out well.

That being said, maybe the hololens can be good enough nonetheless, because interaction latency is separate from pose/presentation latency and the latter is certainly far more make-or-break.

I suspect that the main achievement (or magic sauce) of the hololens is strict separation between position-finding plus persective-correct content rendering (which both together are quite high-latency, relatively speaking) on one hand and the final push to the actual framebuffer on the other, where a last corrective shift(/and maybe rotate(/and even more maybe zoom)) correction can be applied independently. The latter would be very low latency, based on the difference between camera frame at the beginning of the rendering process and most recent camera frame. This would be closely related (if not derived from) software-based shake reduction in cameras, which in turn might be traced back to the algorithms used in optical mice (which lack rotation/zoom).

I agree that the interface is much more important with this, where you are immersed, than iPhone where you can step away easily. The adjustments people made to iPhone were getting used to a non-textile keyboard and finding other controls on the screen -- but those controls worked well. Shake reduction could probably help significantly. Definitely some sort of stabilization in the representation between you and your cursor.

I'm not sure if position finding for the head is very separate from rendering, just because it is so smooth when he moves. I think head positioning is very separate from gesture positioning -- which is why cursors are jumpy. Maybe 13of40 is right on getting used to the interface -- maybe the user is holding his hand out too straight, not straight enough or something to that effect, but that still seems more of an interface problem than user problem. I do wish it was priced closer to oculus. At that oculus pricing I would probably get one, but at 4x it seems not quite there (interface and lacking apps).

13of40 - I think it is more "version 1" issues with the shake and a lack of the best human-to-computer interface rather than an "interface that nobody's used".

Put-that-there[0] is an interface from the early 1980's that seems like it would do well to reduce the janky interactions. Speech recognition probably isn't quite where it needs to be for a generic setup (as opposed to the structured setup of put-that-there).

Like I said, the computer to human side -- rendering virtual objects over a real field -- is beautiful. The quirks with incomplete map information aren't too distracting because we are good at filling in the gaps. The human to computer side needs work because it takes 30s to do a simple resizing operation. If you could say "make that screen 90 percent of my field of view" at any time the vid author wouldn't be complaining that getting too close causes clipping of his field of view.

[0]http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pr2KIPQOKE

I don't think there's a different level of 'good enough' required here - it's just that we're so early in the development of AR UI that we don't yet know what good enough will look like. The iPhone was the first touch interface that was low enough latency to feel like you were touching and sliding the images around behind the screen. Making those scroll and pinch-to-zoom interactions feel right was critical to its success. Certainly right now these Hololens interactions are not as slick and gratifying as flick-scrolling was in the original mobile Safari. And Apple and other manufacturers have now spent years optimizing screens to make the image seem closer to the surface of the glass and playing with varying success with haptics and pressure sensing and so on.

But people had phones before the iPhone, and they were sluggish as well. Jumping from keypad to touchscreen was a jump large enough to to be botchable (as a few attempts before the iPhone had clearly shown), but tiny nonetheless compared to the jump to a large HMD (from what exactly, btw?). There is no way to casually use the hololens like you might occasionally use a laptop sitting on the side of a paper-centric desk without going fully electronic, it's pretty much an all or nothing commitment. Nobody would tie a contraption like that to their head to use it just for a fraction of the tasks at hand.

> ...adjusts the display output at 240 frames per second...

Hot Dang! I guess that ought to keep a VR object stable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com