Microsoft starts shipping Windows 10 mixed reality developer kits this month
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The finger clicks work like 60% of the time, and the windows seem to vary in opaqueness which really threw me off. (And yes, the FOV is pretty terrible right now). But for minutes at a time, I'd be fully immersed.
Mixed reality will be one of the biggest transformations, I think. The digital world used to be restrained to our desks. Right now, we carry it around with us in our pockets (and maybe even on our wrists). But with augmented reality, it's going to be joined with our real world - the two are finally going to truly merge. It's impossible to know what will develop from this.
We live in interesting times.
Sounds like a golden opportunity.
The MR headsets coming out soonish are hopefully going to have a decent FOV, and it seems they can be paired with traditional controllers:
https://uploadvr.com/gdc-2017-hands-on-with-microsofts-first...
But AR is a lot more straightforward. Put the headset on and hey, there's new things floating around in your vision. Simple as that. You're not locked away into another world. VR could be a great gaming and movie platform, but for day-to-day life AR seems so much more useful.
Looking at these developer headsets, it looks like they're moving closer to VR and further from AR. With the camera inputs I'm guessing they're aiming to simply use the camera feed and overlay things on top of that - it'd solve the opacity issues with the current overlays. I'm guessing we'll be gravitating more towards a virtual world with real objects overlayed in it rather than a real world with virtual objects.
Industrial uses and helpdesking are obvious. 1. Less need for physical interfaces on machinery 2. Need help in, say, fixing the elevator? AR allows the helper in other end see what you see and point out things and direcr movement in persons field of view 3. Building maintenance. To point out the location of work, just let the AR device guide you there
This is pretty much the simplest possible AR (one object via marker and handheld device). Decent AR glasses are quite good in warehouses etc...basically think heads up display. Mixed reality seems to be focused on meetings/conversations in all the samples but I'm sure there's other interesting applications. We've experimented with tracking buildings and so on and I can see adding stats and info to real world objects.
The tech isn't quite there yet (FOV), interaction will remain a big barrier for quite some time (imo). There will also be some interesting ethical questions that need to be asked once we really "get there" and the objects get so real that they are hard/impossible to distinguish. Think about facial recognition+overlays of different faces etc.
Easy to imagine how people would use one meeting other people in a party (must be some fashionable glasses), buying groceries, or merely receiving notifications doing whatever.
Hard to imagine how it would be useful within known people, or in leisure activities (except for AR games).
At work one would need to look at it case by case. I doubt there's any general tool.
This tells me that Microsoft still doesn't quite have the corporate culture for the level of innovation they are aiming at. They should have abandoned opaqueness in favor of a really wide FOV, and stuck with a reticle system or some other more robust for pointing and selection.
That's putting words in my mouth. I'm talking about what the company should have been prioritizing. If there's a physical clicker, then they should have left out the highly unreliable hand gestures. The fact that they didn't shows they don't quite have the corporate culture and/or management insight to do this kind of innovation.
When creating a new category of this kind, you don't put things in too early and turn mainstream customers off. That would have been like introducing the iPhone with a much smaller screen than it had, and with a wonky multitouch.
Yes, the promise of true AR is great. But so far I have seen no example of an AR application that does a wonderful job semantically understanding the world around you and correspondingly attaching things into your view. Every experience I've seen for the Hololens so far does a great job with tracking, but there is no true interaction with the physical world -- the applications are simply aware of some general constraints on what the surfaces of the room look like.
In VR, on the other hand, a demo like Zuckerberg's I think convincingly showed just how powerful a VR experience can be and how seamlessly elements from the real world can be integrated into it.
I honestly am curious as to why people are so readily seeing much greater potential in AR. Perhaps in the VERY long term, but for a good long while I can only see VR applications dominating the market.
Even when we have good subtractive rendering and a decent FOV - there are still massive constraints on the type of environment you need to have. AR reduces to VR with enough restrictions on room geometry.
Also - I want to be elsewhere - not in my house or office with extra things added in.
The point of AR is not to offer compelling experiences, it's point is to expedite real world industrial and service processes and planning.
Don't think of how cool it's supposed to look. Think how much it saves when the maintenance crew can navigate a new building as easily as in a video game. The selling point is not to have some cool experiences. The selling point is to have for the repair crew a navigation track to the maintenance item, and a red arrow pointing to it.
If AR worked a bit better than it currently does I could easily come up with 5 or 6 real practical (and quite dull) applications that would make life a lot easier for people here at work. I cannot say the same about VR.
Especially compared to the Oculus Rift which still starts at $499.
I had a chance to try a HoloLens, and the AR was impressive but the head tracking was even more so. Just very, very solid.
But that tiny window ruined it completely for me. It just isn't immersive at all. Sure it is functional and cool, but I don't honestly think that it's going to be all that useful until the field of view is much larger. Another thing that annoyed me was that I couldn't get close to the holograms. You had to stand at least 1-2 meters away. Maybe it was incorrect settings or something, but kind of disappointing when MS had led me to believe it would be as immersive as VR.
What I have is an XPS 15 with a GTX 1050 with 4GB ram.
Once you have it set up, look for "Mixed Reality Portal" in the Start menu. It will guide you through the setup, starting with a check that you have compatible hardware.
For a developer kit, I guess you follow the links to sign up at
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/03/01/windo...
and pray...
Don't spend too much time on Windows holographic, as it won't become the defacto standard in AR
Create some pass-through mobile games/experiences with Vuforia or Kudan. Hand-held AR isn't that compelling IMO, but many of the lessons you learn from it will be applicable for headset AR
If anyone has recommendations for a more open stack I'm listening (own a Unity license but think it's meh-ish for AR). Most certainly would like to migrate from Vuforia since I don't want to bet on something that could just go Mataio and be gone (+licensing cost is pretty prohibitive but acceptable for my use case).
Microsoft Hololens is 3,000usd. Is there any cheaper AR headset?
Right now there aren't any cheaper AR headsets (worth buying), but there will be later this year. (and now a plug for my own startup: https://www.miralabs.io/)
So another update that will fail to install on my force-upgraded laptop from 2009, but will still try every day, no matter what, whenever it feels like it?
Anybody in the market for a laptop shaped brick for cheap?
- Augmented Reality: you have a see-through display which lets you see the real world with virtual objects added to it.
- Mixed Reality: you have an opaque display which shows a model of the real world, updated in real time using cameras, with virtual objects added to it.
[1] https://www.wareable.com/vr/michael-abrash-what-vr-will-look...
IKEA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC6t2eEPkPc Lego (oldish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uqxsIQNUPU
<quote>If anyone sees Raymond E. Arvidson, PhD, walking the halls of Washington University wearing Microsoft HoloLens, then he's not entirely walking on Earth. HoloLens combined with OnSight, a software tool developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in collaboration with Microsoft, allows Arvidson to be absorbed in the Martian landscape conducting 'field' research. Arvidson may actually be walking on university flooring, but the software is allowing him to virtually walk on Mars with NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. In his role as Curiosity Surface Properties Scientist, Arvidson is planning Curiosity's next move.
</quote>