Mobile Holoportation | Hacker News Reader

Mobile Holoportation

microsoft.com

122 pointsQworg43 comments

I'm not one to be easily impressed by technology and I must say the hololens is incredibly incredibly impressive. We have a couple at the office and whenever I spend time with one I'm really taken aback at what this will become. I like VR, but the augmentation between the physical and the virtual is what I'm most excited about. I mean it when I say, at least for me, hololens really changed my frame of reality. I feel like I sound kinda fanboi and overly enthusiastic, but I encourage you to try and find a way to use one if you've not. (trying it for the first time: http://john.je/iDpX)

I don't like "first experience with Tech X" sort of videos because with AR and VR there is just so much going on that is new and novel to the user that there is no chance to stop and actually evaluate the technology on its merits.

I want a great AR system, but no such device exists. I've had a Hololens for about 3 months now, on loan from a client that asked me to build an app for them. If Hololens is at all any indication of the current state of the art (and Magic Leap is officially on its sixth year of childishly teasing "we got a secret and we ain't telling"), then this tech is easily 5 years away from being consumer ready. This is not even to the usability level of the Oculus DK1 yet. There are zero usable apps because there is zero way to usably interact with apps. The Hololens is an incredible feat of engineering. But I'll stick to VR for now. It's usable now and there are customers now.

I am really impressed with the Hololens myself. I bought one. It is still not quite there. The FOV is way, way too narrow, the Resolution is too low for serious work, and gestures are not very accurate.

I've also found that the device itself becomes uncomfortable after wearing it for a short period. I have however worn it for more than 2 hours in a row once or twice.

My niece (6 years) loved it so much she kept playing with it for hours also; She played Roboraid or just placed holograms in the living room like little dolls. Took me 10 minutes to clean up :-).

Not everybody I've had try it, were as impressed, and I think most people I've shown it to, think of it as a gimmick.

I don't think a lot of 'lenses will find their way under the Christmas tree this year. Too expensive. But if they got the price down around the cost of an iPad, it would blow the success of iPad away -- Even in the 'lense's current form...

It is another one of those things that indicate that Microsoft is on the right path as a tech company. Now, where is Apple's AR product?

It will come. There's no way they're not developing something. There's all the articles about the patents they have and what not. Tim Cook has commented on AR vs VR. But, in typical Apple fashion, they'll announce it out of nowhere and tell you can buy it NEXT WEEK!

We'll see...

Apple has disappointed me a bit lately, but I definitely think AR makes more sense for Apple than trying to build a car.

Microsoft may have some advantage in that they've done a lot research in the field of 3D scanning and have lots of experience with Kinect, though.

I'm not sure what that link you posted is. Even after adding 15 uMatrix rules I couldn't get it to work (whitelisted everything that wasn't tracking i.e. Google Analytics, Segment, ShareThis).

https://d1ax1i5f2y3x71.cloudfront.net/items/063E411607300s0R...

Thanks!

> Even after adding 15 uMatrix rules I couldn't get it to work (whitelisted everything that wasn't tracking i.e. Google Analytics, Segment, ShareThis).

Wouldn't it just be easier to disable uMatrix temporarily for his site? That being said the site just brings up an error page for me too.

Sure, like it's always easier to let yourself be tracked. Why would I for any random link though?

> The greatest challenge was bandwidth, which we reduced by 97% using an innovative approach to compression.

Waiting for the Pied Piper partnership announcement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU

Well the technology is great, even if the internet in Jackson Hole is bad.

You just introduced me to pied piper and that silicon valley sitcom. :(

I should have listened when someone said HN is just noise now.

It's a great tv serie! Season 3 is so contemporary.

"Holoportation is a new type of 3D capture technology that allows high-quality 3D models of people to be reconstructed, compressed and transmitted anywhere in the world in real time. When combined with mixed reality displays such as HoloLens, this technology allows users to see, hear, and interact with remote participants in 3D as if they are actually present in the same physical space."

Do you mean an absolute reduction of 97% (100mb/s to 3mb/s, for example) or relative (100mb/s to 53mb/s)?

It says it now requires 30 - 50 Mbps, I would assume relative or this compression algorithm is the real story here. Though, it could of been uncompressed bitmaps or something to begin with.

So this "transports" you from inside a moving vehicle to a conference anywhere in the world, assuming the conference is happening with participants wearing Hololens.

It's crazy impressive, but it seems really far ahead of time for now. Crazy exciting, but does anyone know when things like this will be more practical, realistically?

In five years we should have the bandwidth (both computational and network) to make this application reachable on the consumer level.

So makes sense to start working on the engineering now, considering much of it is novel, right?

I'd already start thinking about product and services soonish if one thinks there will actually be consumer demand for this tech.

Just like Apple believed and progressed towards facetime, Microsoft believed and is progressing towards teleconferencing with people visibly present in front of you.

Except Facetime, was really not the first of its kind -- We already had video conferencing before it.

The first publication of the idea of video-telephony, in fact came only a year or two after the telephone, and the first commercial video telephony service was available for public use in the 30's... People usually don't realise just how old that idea is...

Or how early it became viable on the internet - CU-SeeMee [1] was one of the first services I used on the internet, back in '93.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe

From what I know, the major blockers are battery life and unit cost. The battery life is decent (or so I read), but it's not near the "walking around" level.

Display area is also important, but that's a quality thing; there's just straight up things you can't do without enough battery life and given too much cost.

> we reduced [bandwidth requirements] by 97%

> The bandwidth required by Holoportation has been reduced to 30-50 Mbps

Does this mean the previous demos required 900+Mbps of bandwidth?

I believe that's compared against the full, raw bandwidth requirement of a 30fps hologram and texture.

I think the real importance of this announcement is the reduction of needed bandwidth by 97% while still maintaining transmission quality - that's amazing!

I guess it doesn't amaze me at all without knowing a lot of details. I could write the most naïve format imaginable as a first draft and easily get a 99% reduction in a second version.

Nvidia and Microsoft continue to play friendly competitors in the AR space. Holoportation is quite similar to Nvidia's Virtual Eye tech, and MS [s]is using some of Nvidia's optics tech[/s] [EDIT: is using Nokia's tech to compete with Nvidias AR tech] in the Hololens. Could Nvidia get big enough that Microsoft wouldn't buy them?

Nvidia's market cap is $50 billion, which is 5 times Microsoft's biggest acquisition, Skype at $8.5 billion.

Microsoft sources parts from many companies. They are a software company, not a hardware company, at their core. It's good to have partners with different markets. They don't need complete vertical integrations.

I thought Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for around $26 billion?

There are no NVIDIA parts in the Hololens... It uses a ULV Intel processor with integrated graphics, along with what Microsoft calls a "holographic processing unit" which is built by Microsoft, but utilizes slightly customized Tensilica cores for DSP offload.

Oops it was Nokia's EPE optics I was thinking of, not Nvidia.

How does it work with N people ? Do I see other with Vive or hololens on their head ? or the head is actually "reconstructed", and in that case, the eyes are not tracked ?

This is the sort of thing that could spur on an interest in Windows as a mobile platform again. Imagine if someday you could "holoport" to meet and talk with people using your phone and a pair of glasses.

Of course, the article in question requires a setup in the car, which allows them to place cameras, and currently it still requires Wi-Fi grade signal for it to work.

If this holo tech gets real traction I'd hope (and expect) that they'd go cross-platform with iOS/Android as first class platforms. I like WinMo but its not exactly hoovering up market share from Apple and Android.

Microsoft seems a bit more pragmatic about multi-platform now. I'm sure the business model will revolve around running your holo-server on an Azure instance or running holo-skype meetings from your corporate Office 365 subscription tied to your corporate iPad. They are moving towards device/platform agnostic services. The lock-in is server side in the cloud :)

Sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had to whip up custom hardware to make it happen. I'd think you'd want 3D cameras on the phone, plus AR glasses that would need to be light enough for travel.

I know this isn't exactly what you meant, but people have been able to run azure instances for the sharing service that the hololens can hook into. It's awesome, I'm so glad to have had the chance to work with the hololens and AR.

Microsoft is pushing Windows Holographic as OS.

It is a Windows platform where you can place 2D windows in 3D space while some applications can display 3D graphics. You end up e.g. having a browser on one wall, a photos app on another wall, and a weather app on a third wall. It is not quite there yet, I think. But it is actually pretty cool!

For now, it feels like Microsoft is way ahead of Apple and Google on the OS side.

But isn't it just because they show things in development? Apple doesn't do that. And Google has learned a few lessons in that regard too.

Hmm... Not entirely sure.

Windows Holographic is out there with end-users. Albeit with some/many shortcomings and obviously still being developed (like every other OS) -- I would compare it more to iOS 1.0, which was pretty stable but also had many short comings.

Apple and Google haves not released anything for end-users or even demoed anything... so I still feel Microsoft is ahead. Obviously, I don't know what Apple and Google are working on internally (or Microsoft for that matter).

How ready is Holoportation to play around with? If I get a developers edition of the Hololense...could I recreate the guy with his kid in the room demo they did?

Found this paper, guess I'll read it on the train:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2984517

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