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Comment by hacker_9 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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.

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.

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