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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) chip used in its virtual reality HoloLens specs

It seems to be insurmountably hard for press to understand that virtual reality and augmented reality are related but distinct concepts.

Beyond that, interesting teardown. The 10w number is great, but my guess is a lot of the high power processing happens in the sensor suite because it's using 4 repurposed IR sensor receiver combos to relay depth data in a highly structured way. That means this processor is the glue between the IMU and RGBD camera combo. I think in the end this can't scale down to consumer side with this approach, not to mention the other hindrances to scaling down with the protection system.

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> It seems to be insurmountably hard for press to understand that virtual reality and augmented reality are related but distinct concepts.

The media write in the language understood by the reader, not the jargon of the domain expert. Once the AR-VR distinction filters down to most readers, media writers will dutifully follow suit.

Like describing a semi-automatic weapon as "automatic", frequently misusing "assault rifle", or calling a magazine a "clip"? No, the press is full of people who barely understand what they're writing about, they aren't purposefully dumbing down content for the reader. I certainly don't envy them, because it would be impossible for them to always know what color the boat house is unless they stuck to one very narrow field.

Bangy thing, long dakka dakka boomstick, hologram. Just be glad you don't fly quadcopters or you'd get drone rage, too. /s

The media can describe the distinction when it is relevant to the issue at hand, possibly with the jargon of the field and possibly without. In the article, the distinction between AR and VR wasn't relevant.

They can when the mistake is too obvious to be overlooked. Pretend for a moment that this article is your introduction to the poorly named HaloLens. The distinction between AR and VR is incredibly important to a story about the thing's sensors DSP. AR and VR use sensors very differently, and a VR chip is going to be much less impressive than an AR chip.

How can the AR-VR distinction filter down to most readers?

I'd say the media also has a responsibility to broaden the scope of what the readers understand...

In my experience as an AR dev you have to actually experience it to understand.

Why? The difference is easy to explain. AR overlays things on your vision, VR replaces it with something else.

With your description someone might just think what you see with a Military jet HUD or Google Glass. Saying "overlay" doesn't tell you anything about depth.

A HUD is AR, some HUDs are just more impressive than others. When you are talking about the difference between printers and monitors, the function of either is so different that it doesn't make sense to describe SVGA and XGA monitors separately.

An ordinary persons understanding of holograms (ie as a shimmery 3d light projection, like in Star Wars) is actually quite close to AR, which presumably is why MS have chosen to use that term. It's a bit more immediately understandable than Augmented Reality.

I think he is referring to the use of "virtual reality" instead of "augmented reality" and not to the use of "holographic".

> It seems to be insurmountably hard for press to understand that virtual reality and augmented reality are related but distinct concepts.

Microsoft hasn't helped in this case, with all their blabbering on about "holograms" when as far as I can tell, the images it produces are not holograms in any conventional sense of the word (although the diffraction-based wave guiding is pretty cool.)

Isn't VR just AR with the camera covered?

Not really. VR is an entire immersive environment to itself, it doesn't have to interact with reality.

AR has to blend in to the environment around, so it's a different class of problem. It has to locate points in the scene to add things to and project in a believable manner.

Turn off the lights. It's VR.

Not really, turn out the lights and you'll stop seeing AR at all.

VR will, for example, create a room with a table and put a chess game on that table. This all happens within the VR author's control and designs.

AR has to analyse the scene and find the table, find the angle the table is at relative to the eyes, compute the position and perspective of the table and the chess board to look correct on the table.

Both have the same end result - images projected to a user's eyes - but how they get there is quite different.

Hololens does not proxy the user's viewport through a camera, but the user is looking at the real world through a semitransparent visor, and contents are overlaid on that visor.

BTW, The viewport is quite narrow in the current version, but I have to say, tracking works REALLY well.

I was about to disagree with you but then I realized you're right. Yes, exactly, VR is just AR with the camera covered. It's a subset of the AR challenge, which is much more difficult.

I'd flip it around. AR is VR where you're given an exogenously-generated background into which you have to integrate your elements. Said background owes you no duty to coöperate.

Flippant, but:

VR: Everything is in the computer

AR: The computer is in everything

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