Lenovo launches HoloLens competitor
engadget.com
engadget.com
Also, once again (as with Valve vs. HTC) we see the pattern playing out:
1) Platform owner develops new tech to be used on their platform, tries to foster an ecosystem
2) Third parties develop products based on the tech
3) Third parties launch competing platform because in the end, platforms are more profitable than hardware
4) Market is fragmented and we can't have nice things
1) MS will sue Lenovo.
2) China will threaten MS with consequences including no access to China market.
3) MS will withdraw the lawsuit and lick its wounds.
How the hell did we get in this mess....
Why don't companies understand that Chinese market is a one off access. The moment some Chinese company copies IP, that access is gone. It's a very myopic strategy to accept such losses as a trade-off for doing business in China.
This could be a relationship just like PC OEMs like Lenovo already have, licensing things with a royalty. The prominence of the AR apps in windows (preinstalled in many cases) well before the hardware that Microsoft made themselves was ready for mass adoption makes it clear that they want Windows and that ecosystem to have a play in AR and VR.
We've seen hardware plays like this in the past with the Surface design which seems to have too odd of a cadence and release cycle to be purely motivated as a product offering. The design was meant to be an influence on the market, which helped windows machines remain relevant in a space where Apple sees devices like the iPad fitting.
Nothing, but they'll be wanting HoloLens-class devices to be running Windows. This thing runs Android.
> We've seen hardware plays like this in the past with the Surface design which seems to have too odd of a cadence and release cycle to be purely motivated as a product offering.
As you say, the Surface was aimed squarely at heading high end iOS devices off at the pass.
Microsoft doesn't care too much about hardware. They care a whole heckin' lot about Windows. (Just like Valve with Steam, for instance.) The hardware is ephemeral, owning the platform is where it's at.
Platforms are great, and I'm honestly pretty pumped about Microsoft's more-open-source future.
(Which is often an interesting Big Deal in cyberpunk novels; it's not the hardware or the operating system, it is who controls the database connecting the real and virtual worlds.)
The article states that Lenovo doesn't have strong opinions about which OS the hardware runs, so it sounds like Lenovo has hedged to also support Windows on the hardware when the time comes that Windows on ARM is out of Beta (around the time that the HoloLens 2 releases?). Microsoft will still have a play to convince people to buy the Lenovo hardware and run Windows on it, the hardware sounds classed to be capable of it, and that's probably a good competition for all involved.
Imagine allowing a class of undergraduate students to participate in a version of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and draw their own conclusions as to potential flaws in its methodology.
Or, as a philosophy student: allow students to engage in a real life rendition of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, where a student "competes" against his or her classmates and various versions of text generation algorithms from simple Markov chain generators, to OpenAI's GPT-2 and beyond.
https://github.com/immersivecognition/unity-experiment-frame...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2Fs13428-019-01242...
There are also some older papers by Loomis et al. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03200735
The arts.
There's still a lot of interest (at least from where I'm standing) in VR etc as a creative medium. There's some really remarkable work being created.
I recently experienced some VR art at the Walker Art Center (museum of modern art) in Minneapolis and was decidedly underwhelmed.
Not really. Most stuff is released to Steam or the Oculus Store and it's reported and occasionally reviewed on VR blogs and subreddits.
> I recently experienced some VR art at the Walker Art Center (museum of modern art) in Minneapolis and was decidedly underwhelmed.
What was it? Actual VR or just 360 video?
SIGGRAPH has a VR Theatre where they show short VR films [1].
EyeJack is a platform for AR art, though you may need to visit an exhibit to see the actual art. [2]
[1] https://s2018.siggraph.org/conference/conference-overview/co...
I've seen a lot of VR gaming, or at least, I did, approximately 18-12 months ago, but it really seems to have petered out.
There's very little similarity between VR and 3D TV. The latter was mostly driven by marketing teams whilst the former was and is mostly driven by enthusiasts.
> I've seen a lot of VR gaming, or at least, I did, approximately 18-12 months ago, but it really seems to have petered out.
The Quest is about to be released. That's where most of the excitement is at the moment as it's a new form factor and potentially a new market.
When VR controllers get there you could program an industrial robot arm just by doing the activity yourself in a simulated environment.
Disclaimer: I have a wearable computer with head mounted display (Vufine+, ~$200) and one-handed wireless keyboard (Twiddler 3, ~$200). The rest is Raspberry Pi Zero W and a powerbank. All devices are off-the-shelf, no soldering whatsoever.
AR headsets are still a magnitude too expensive.
It’s great and will bring more people to the market but it is still to be seen if that price point for something only a single person can enjoy at a time will be a game changer.
The Oculus on the other hand has to provide not just good ergonomics, but also content that showcases the hardware well.
I had a Galaxy S7 and GearVR headset in 2016. Some of the games were cool like a TRON-style Pong game, but most of the content was awful, stuff like "explore a famous museum", which was all badly optimized, pixelated 3D video.
Even if Oculus launched with a VR version of a product that's known to be highly sticky engagement wise (e.g Fortnite), I don't know if people would go for it. Fortnite is already on every device anyway, are people really so into it that they want to be fully immersed visually when playing?
The mobile market is orders of magnitude bigger than the desktop market ever was.
Once it becomes something that people want without knowing why, then it'll be iPhone level.
It already has. Four of my buddies that play Rocket League almost exclusively have dropped AU$300 on a headset because we showed them Beat Saber at a LAN party, and they haven't stopped playing it since.
Headset VR like this is indeed being evaluated mostly for non-consumer applications right now, including manual labor guidance (think mechanics and surgeons), team collaboration, and 3D design, but the price and capabilities are at least a generation away from being appealing to most companies.
If this device can run Windows Holographic I think this could be really great. Lenovo already works with Microsoft to run it on some of their budget AR headsets but it is unclear to me whether Microsoft will grant them permission to use it on something that's a more direct Hololens competitor. I get the impression that running their own android-based holographic OS will not be the best though.
For example, my car has a rear camera, which overlays where you are going depending on the position of the steering wheel. This is reality augmented, but since it feels so natural, nobody thinks about this as AR.
Some go a bit further and overlay imaginary barriers based on the distance of objects near you: https://cnet2.cbsistatic.com/img/gvHEEq5aZgDanoLARwsAzNN66Qk...
But yeah, in general this application doesn't have the kind of impact people are talking about when they say mainstream AR.
I, personally, find that more interesting than VR toy/game I've seen so far.
[0]https://www.roadtovr.com/monthly-connected-vr-headsets-on-st...
You'll see people randomly using the measurement tools and other "boring" AR utilities all the time now, and then there are games like Ingress, Pokémon Go, and the soon to be released Harry Potter AR game, which all have rather large consumer adoption.
AR is getting so prevalent it's already "boring" or just a part of the user experience for consumers. What that means for eventual adoption of "goggles AR" for consumers is an interesting question. It's probably going to come down to form factor preferences and how many people want their main computing device to be in their pocket versus worn on their head, or how easy it is for the device to "flex" between roles as interest/necessary.