Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles
wired.com
wired.com
It's just so much easier to explain to people what it is if you say Holographic vs Augmented Reality - even though it is technically wrong. Kudos to MSFT for making that leap.
[1] Shameless plug for (http://www.visidraft.com), my AR CAD company.
Pretty much everything in this space is incorrect on some level. People casually call the Oculus "VR" when its just a HMD. The VR is going to be the software that works with the HMD. This is like calling a joystick a game.
Personally, I like the hologram branding. Its like the Star Trek holodeck, which invokes a really neat sense of futurism.
What people? Things I've never heard anybody say:
"Can you hand me my Oculus air quotes VR?"
"Dude, I spilled deer urine all over my Oculus virtual reality!"
I can imagine a northern european saying it in english, but those guys kind of sound like lolcats anyway:
"Sven, can I has Oculus virtual reality?"
Personally, I dislike the hologram branding - yet another corruption to spread confusion. I understand the motive, I just don't like it.
People will learn new words that define new things and then suddenly it will seem the most natural thing in the world to call it by that name.
I bet it would take along time for most people asked "how does a vacuum cleaner work?" to use the word vacuum, apart from as a name for the object.
But yeah, I wouldn't say "vacuum" as a method of action unless you really drilled down. (Something about "pump" and "sucking", but I'd have to think for a bit to get to the actual physical "vacuum" aspect of it.)
Also 'clicker' for remote.
All the companies are branding as "mobile." I don't think they really even sell household corded phones anymore, we don't have to be specific about them.
If I wanted a corded phone, I think I'd have to use that specific modifier to get one.
Anyway, back to the point--say "mobile phone" to Americans and they know it's a cellular phone.
Smart Phones were hot tech, but our non-technical families didn't really get the point until suddenly those "smart phones" were "iPhones".
Web searches were a mystical dark art, with all your Alta Vista voodoo, until there was a single box with an algorithm that did a pretty good job finding what you meant... and then many competitors later, someone called one of those boxes "Google" and now that's the verb we use.
Marketing, sales, adoption drive the names things come to be known by. Sure, in reality it's Augmented Reality, but if in 5 years everyone's talking about their sweet new Holographic ski goggles, it's still AR in the mainstream.
A rose by any other name
Also what Google brought that Altavista didn't have was that it actually returned relevant results, not pages of spam where webmaster cranked as many keywords as they could (including "Pamela Anderson", always).
We re-appropriate words all the time in English, and it's generally a fine thing to do, specialists' consternation notwithstanding.
But vacuum cleaners and and cell phones contain the name the explanation of what they are and do. "augmented reality" doesn't. Holographic... it does a better job, at least for some people.
"Mobile phone" could have made sense to someone even before the introduction of mobile phones. But I think the word "cell phone" only took on meaning after the introduction of the device itself.
In comparison Radio tends to have a single tower that sends radio waves and does not care about who is listing. The advantage for cellphones is you can reuse the bandwidth from the same small set of frequencies across the country AND maintain a phonecall durring a handoff (where raido keeps forcing you to change stations on a long trip). The issue is the phone's need to rebroadcast their position constantly which eats’ battery life. It's even worse when they fail to connect to a tower as they just keep trying until the battery fails.
Granted, an end user might care, but MMX or SSE mean little to most Intel customers. 'with techron', 'dual turbo', 'LED TV's', 'tessellation', 'electrolytes'
Augmented reality, on the other hand...
However, I doubt this is the case, else they wouldn't just slap this announcement at the end of a boring Windows 10 presentation. I mean, all I could remember about this presentation was: "Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10 with HOLOGRAMS using Windows 10! Windows 10. Windows 10. Windows 10."
I keep feeling like watching the Longhorn demo at PDC 2003...
So noting they have described defies the laws of physics.
Edit: although, of course they'll need some intelligence on the surroundings to identify surfaces and stuff. But imagine like re-decorating your work room, adding scifi textures or something, and maybe pipes or whatever ;p
Most likely it suffers the same shaky snap laggy tracking like every other AR setup.
I did see a tiny bit of judder in the footage that was supposed to be exactly what the person wearing the glasses would see, but it was hard to tell.
In case any reader here weren't aware how Kinect works, it sends to the developer a 2D image of the depth. Of course as walod says, there's work to do to identify surfaces (as you can see on the image below, background elements are excluded).
http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/hands-on-with-the-xbox-one/micro...
EX: http://www.photographyblogger.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/06... Now picture an infocus immage behind the blurry background pen's.
So sad...
I'm sorry, but there is no wearable device which can handle terabytes of data per second. Heck, my brand new Haswell has a peak memory bandwidth of 17GB/s; even to the L1 cache, its theoretical max is 700GB/s.
This sounds like a puff PR piece.
I'm confused Wire - please clarify
That's not really an excuse to dumbly repeat something which sounds so amazingly far-fetched (see other comment elsewhere, what sensors even produce TBs of data per second?), it verges on the physically impossible, reporting it without even blinking an eye--such as "yes, you read that right, we think it's hard to believe too", or preferably some explanation of how it can even be possible. How did the reporter not go "Wait what--terabytes per second?!!".
Completely understandable, given the fact that Wired Magazine is after all, pretty new to all this computing and technology business ... /s
I can't imagine any (tech-savvy) editor proofreading this not going "wait what, terabytes, really??" -- which is then presumably their job to doublecheck.
1:48:45 in the official video: http://news.microsoft.com/windows10story/
(not head-mounted!)
As a point of reference the Leap Motion Dragonfly has 2 x 3K sensors w/ 225fps color and 720fps tracking.
Presumably the "HPU" is an ASIC that bakes in some sort of SLAM/positional tracking, skeletal tracking, and gaze tracking.
Eight or more virtual cores plus SIMD operations that can smash against large chunks of data per cycle adds up awfully fast on a 4GHz chip.
They're also probably counting the fact that data flows from one system to another in sequence, but adding up each sequence. Eight streams of 150 gigabytes per second for example.
This doesn't count information that's captured but discarded at the source, processed away before it's transmitted downstream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R1snVxGNVs
I think Google over-promised initially which lead to many being underwhelmed with Glass. I hope Microsoft isn't making the same mistake here.
First thing, it crashes, a lot. We're talking 2-5 minutes active 3d scanning before the structure sensor driver bites the big one. Requires killing and restarting service along with all programs associated.
Also had hard freezes as well.
Its "google quality" in other words, crap. It might get better. It probably won't, given their track history regarding consumer devices in "google beta" (read as alpha).
There was also the other Kinect demo that featured Milo, but Molyneux probably deserves the blame for that infamous piece of hype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDvHlwNvXaM#t=10
I definitely want HoloLens to be real, too, but to avoid heartbreak I'll temper my hopes until more reports come in. Or, even better, a firsthand experience.
And given that most normal people would know that it was socially awkward to use it in public only "glassholes" remained. This meant that buying/wearing Glass tarnished you with that label and associated you with that group.
They didn't. Years later, the reason to wear Glass remained "take pictures/videos hands free and shave 3 seconds off the time it takes you to check your text messages."
The MS product seems pretty clearly to be more broadly capable hardware, but I do still wonder if it will have actual applications.
I wonder if its "killer app" might just be that now a virtually big screen takes up little physical space/weight.
Clear the big monitor off your desk, now your 11" laptop (or smaller) can effectively have a 40" screen, etc.
Unlike Oculus, you can still see the real world. Unlike Google Glass, it's a big display and not an awkward eye movement.
There's still the barriers of - showing other people stuff - social awkwardness of sitting with a keyboard seeming (to others) to be staring into empty space while working - it might feel like wearing a hat - what's the effective pixel density like?
It is absolutely possible to use a lens system to move the focal point to the distance, but hasn't been done yet, probably because you can't do it on 120x120 degrees.
I wouldn't work on a virtual screen for long hours until there's an answer to that. But once it is solved, I can see how we'll all become Holographic addicts ;)
My supervisor shot it down because "Google glass will do that" :(
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/google-glass-2-0-eight-things-addre...
"7. On that note, don't give one to Robert Scoble"
It's not that Google Glass intrinsically makes you look like a narcissistic douchebag, it's that the first people to show them off were narcissistic douchebags, posing with their smug self important "look at me I want your attention" expressions, who crystallized the image of the "glasshole" in everyone's minds.
Basically a helmet of sorts where you dropped a smartphone into a slot at the top, and some semi-transparent lenses in front of wearer's eyes then made the phone screen appear to float in front of said wearer.
Edit: found an article about it: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/132280-seer-the-augmented-re...
"Microsoft HoloLens goes beyond augmented reality and virtual reality by enabling you to interact with three-dimensional holograms blended with your real world. "
I understand the marketing reasons for this, but contrast this with the fact that Oculus embraces the term "virtual reality" despite the baggage that comes with it and the fact that they can't trademark it. I guess AR never caught the public imagination like VR did.
MS could find the middle ground between lush 3D VR-like environments and the real world. I find things like the Oculus and other HMDs to be terribly claustrophobic and dizzying. Not to mention really asocial. I don't want to mount a tissue-box size thing to my face that removes the real world. I'd prefer having the real world still here with the digital world tied to it. There just seems to be something wrong with giving software my entire field of view. I don't want to stare into the same Unity3D generated environments. I want to augment my real world life, not replace it.
In the early days of computer, the usage was like that...very task oriented. When you are done you go back to your non-digital life. It's only when the technology and public perception changes, you start carrying PCs in your pocket all day long like we are doing today.
That seems much more useful than a VR that you have to plug out of the real world and immerse yourself in - at least for collaboration with others on real world things... like the example with the motorbike design.
Back around 2000 a Slashdot article reported an attempt to create a human-sized hamster ball constructed of a semi-opaque projection-friendly surface. The ball would sit on some sort of roller mount. Five projection screens surrounding the ball would project a virtual environment over the "port", "starboard", "fore", "aft", and "north" surfaces. A human occupant would enter the ball, and, based on his movement detected through the roller base, be presented with a continually updating holodeck-like virtual environment.
Perhaps something like this is still in development somewhere.
What I'm curious to find out is whether HoloLens will run into the same core problem as Glass. People are afraid of people wearing Glass. They're scared that they're being filmed, or worse. Unless HoloLens can avoid making you stand out - by looking like regular glasses, or even contact lenses - I'd guess that HoloLens will end up suffering the same fate as Glass.
I was also thinking about battery life. If it's not designed for outside, then presumably you'll be near a charger, so you're less likely to run out of charge when you need it.
Many people would find tools like these incredibly useful at work, in the car or at home. But not in the street, at the beach or in restaurants whilst talking to other people. That's just socially awkward/insensitive.
Take the example of fixing your car. For example, performing your own oil change, or replacing your alternator. That seems like a perfect use case for holo, right? The goggles would tell you what needs to be done and what the next step is.
But that would involve so many technical challenges that it seems very difficult. You, as the creator of FixYourCar holo app, would need need to detect what type of car the user is looking at, what part of the car they're looking at, render an overlay with the correct orientation, and so on. And at the end of all of that, it's not entirely clear that your app is more helpful to them than if they'd just look up a list of steps for fixing their car using their mobile phone.
I guess what I'm asking is, what do you think holo's killer app would be?
This thing is really crazy!!
Now I'm really excited about this.
Now, a mechanic using this to "see" things that are actually in control of a remote robot? Pretty cool. Showing you the thing that is right in front of you? Cute, but ultimately silly.
How exactly does this work?
You still need to pay for an expert's time -- in fact, you probably need to pay more for it, because the expert is probably faster to do a thing than to explain the thing to you and then you do it. Also, the expert now needs to be someone with these additional skills of coaching someone through an operation.
Tools are still needed -- is there actually a big market for the kind of repairs you can do with the tools that everyone has lying around at home but which is complicated enough to need hand-coaching by an expert?
I mean, maybe! Especially if you can locate the expert in some place where labor prices are much lower (so: India). But then you also need the person to buy the AR goggles. And how often does this use case come up? Is this like 3D printers where people try to sell me on the concept that I could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for something that can make me things that cost less than $20 and which I need three of every year?
Online training though - a whole other thing. Imagine math and physics with interactive 3D visualisations.
Or for kids, a virtual version of one of those 30-in-1 electronics teaching kits.
And so on.
If this works it could be a game changer, and it could also create a whole new app industry.
I just hope the technology is non-crappy, and it doesn't get managementised into uselessness.
An electronics teaching kit might not work on a tablet (but would in VR), and note that any kind of really fluid manipulation of a virtual environment is going to involve a whole additional technology that gives precise locations of your hands (at least). The HoloLens allows a few simple gestures, not the ability to handle virtual objects in many degrees of freedom.
But:
> Tools are still needed -- is there actually a big market for the kind of repairs you can do with the tools that everyone has lying around at home but which is complicated enough to need hand-coaching by an expert?
Almost all repairs on appliances, cars, houses, and so on can be done with tools you have laying around the house; they don't require anything more than a hammer, drill, screwdrivers, wrench sets, etc. The only thing you're typically not going to have on hand is replacement parts, which are usually not too difficult to get your hands on and which you would have to pay for anyway.
When people do this, it's not going to be an "expert", it's going to be something along the lines of "hey dad, look at this real quick."
> But then you also need the person to buy the AR goggles.
The Ars reporting showed someone using a Surface to view and annotate the HoloLens-user's view, not another set of HoloLens. So the barrier is much lower, any Windows 10 PC should be godo enough.
Also, apologies for my brusqueness.
So I think the interesting market is in building the infrastructure/app that makes it easy for vendors to create the content and ship it as a (free) addon for their products.
And that's like riding a bike: you cannot really tell someone how to do it..
It can still be very interesting in many ways!
http://www.bmw.com/com/en/owners/service/augmented_reality_w...
Its not like car manufacturers dont have cad models of their own cars or anything, right?
Sony currently sell an HMD for surgical use, allowing for comfortable and convenient viewing of video from endoscopic cameras. A practical translucent HMD would be extremely valuable in surgical procedures guided by x-ray or ultrasonic imagery.
To give a trivial and easily-implementable example, I would have bought Google Glass without hesitation if it integrated with my electronics test equipment. Being able to view data from an oscilloscope or logic analyser without taking my eyes off the PCB would be a boon. PCBs are designed with fiducial markers as a necessary part of manufacture, and machine vision is already used extensively in many aspects of electronics manufacture and repair; It would be relatively straightforward to overlay all sorts of data that would be enormously useful to technicians and engineers.
Stereoscopic and volumetric displays are used extensively in petroleum and mining geophysics; This equipment is currently relatively niche due to extremely high cost, but could be used in a much greater range of geoinformation applications if costs fell.
Of course, the caveat there would be that my command console would be invisible or hidden still from my opponent. Providing selective vision would make for interesting game possibilities.
And all the C# .NET developers can say again, thank you Microsoft since they have committed to one platform, one store, all device types. I think it will be a while yet before there are thousands of developers working on this, but it will grow exponentially for a while.
If this is comfortable for extended wear, it's just going to further increase the value of remote workers. You can't beat time zones, but for everything else, there's holograms.
I really, really want to understand how high fidelity this is.
One point is we aren't seeing it used for video conferencing between two people each wearing a band. Probably because face-on you look pretty silly in it. So it's not quite a natural way to meet people. Just yet. I think it has world changing potential.
But in 2016 or whenever, this will not be selling for $499 or $899, it's more like $3299 I would guess. And really, that's more like the price level we expect for a very high quality gear. Actually, you could realistically go upward of $10k if the quality truly reflects that price.
So of course the next thing I did was check MSFT stock price. $382 billion market cap. This is a $100 billion idea, might be a good time to get back in. I guarantee you, the market has not fully priced in holograms. Just saying it, you know it's true. For now I will choose to believe the hype, because eventually, absolutely, this is all possible.
Did you factor in the potential disruption by Magic Leap? Retinal projection could be a better bet long-term.
But imagine picking up an original iPhone today and comparing it to v6. Now imagine HoloLens going through that refinement process.
If the platform is as powerful as it sounds, and you can openly develop software which effectively leverages that platform, how is that not awesome?
I mean, it's an entirely new hardware form factor that we all get to hack on and play with, and it's not a sure thing, but if it goes well, it could become mainstream and open an entirely new era of computing.
That's the vision anyway... like I said, I'll choose to believe the hype because it's more fun that way.
Thinking about the design a bit, it's interesting all the compute is on the band, and not broken out to a separate box communicating over wireless. They mention fans blowing hot air away from your head, and then add in the battery too... how long can it run?
I think their use cases are a little weak. There are much more impressive things you could do with this kit.
Also, what does it look like in a dark room?
It looks really really really impressive! It's a see through pair of glasses so not like Occulus and they said they invented a new technology: HPU. The glasses will have their own GPU, CPU and HPU and will be wireless.
> To create Project HoloLens’ images, light particles bounce around millions of times in the so-called light engine of the device. Then the photons enter the goggles’ two lenses, where they ricochet between layers of blue, green and red glass before they reach the back of your eye. “When you get the light to be at the exact angle,” Kipman tells me, “that’s where all the magic comes in.”
They could be doing real holographic images with that description, but who knows.
"Sensors flood the device with terabytes of data every second" ... somehow I doubt the aggregate bandwidth of the device is > 1TB\s
Makes it harder to know how much of the rest of the 'explanations' are accurate.
For further comparison: the fastest CPUs you can get nowadays have an aggregated memory bandwidth of ~ 90 GB/s using four lanes.
Colour: 10.37 Mb/s Depth: 29.1 Mb/s Skeleton: 0.49 Mb/s
So roughly 40Mb/s (4 * 10^7)
Does this device produce > 1Tb/s (1 * 10^12) or 25,000 times as much data? I'd be surprised.
In speaking about the so-called "HPU" (around 01:50 in http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/21/7867593/microsoft-announce..., second video) Kipman mentions "processing terabytes of information from all of these sensors". This is straight from the proverbial horse's mouth, and while it seems hype-ish it should be looked into.
Anyone in here know about this HPU?
Then there's 3D spatial interaction: In my experience with Leap Motion, Kinect, and other competing tech, the level of accuracy still limits interactions to broad gestures. If they've made a big enough leap in this domain to enable precise object manipulation, that's a major achievement on its own.
For instance, if you're looking at a white wall in the real world, there's no way to render a black shape in front of it. You can only add luminance to it, in the same way a video projector can only add luminance to the screen it's projecting an image onto.
"The sun shines brightly over the rover, creating short black shadows on the ground beneath its legs."
It's possible that they are just getting that effect by making the Mars surface bright, but they could also be actively blocking light from the shadow regions. We'll have to wait for more details.
This matters. If it can only brighten things, it can only overlay bright things on top of the real world, which is what Google Glass did. Fine detail won't show up unless the background is very dark or very uniform.
If you look carefully at Microsoft's pictures, the backgrounds are subdued gray, black or brown, and free of glare. The press was forbidden to take pictures of or through the device, and their cameras and phones were confiscated for the demos. Microsoft used custom-built rooms for the demos, giving them total control over the contrast and lighting situation.
It could still work, but it's probably not going to look as good in the real world as it does in the demos.
I could see some "high-precision" gloves being an optional accessory for this that would include some kind of tracker markings to allow even more precise controls (maybe for medical applications or something)
This device will be looking nearly straight down instead, and seems to me that your limbs & fingers will often occlude what is behind them. I doubt the twin cameras used to sense depth would be far enough apart to always see your fingers behind your other arm, for example.
I think Oculus has it right, though, in that any HMD that does positional tracking needs super low latency to feel natural. Should be a little less problematic since the whole world wouldn't lag, but I'd be disappointed if the virtual overlay had perceptible lag after using some of the better experiences on the rift.
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=230...
One like the ones on the pebble watch would allow you to selectively let light through from the outside or let it be reflective and show the microdisplay instead.
http://gd3.alicdn.com/imgextra/i3/1069821249/TB2UIWkbXXXXXXZ...
... and the second layer glowing to show objects.
http://img1.mydrivers.com/img/20140710/c72872d7ae4242b5965e1...
The OLED display facing away from the eyes, bouncing back from a secondary surface.
Or maybe they're just trying to indicate the unreality of the marscape.
Or do you believe they somehow manage to project fullHD per eye with perfect tracking?
http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us
I'm skeptical we'll have anything this remotely usable or practical in our hands in the next 2 years.
He did it at MIT and if I understood correctly, the US military bought everything (he had no say in the matter).
I just watched Google slowly, painfully, realize that Google Glass isn't commercially viable (in it's current form and to the general public). I can't help but feel that this is a larger, albeit more immersive, version of Google Glass.
I only make this point in regards to any plans for a sci-fi, everyday wearable HUD. There is obviously a great demand for this kind of immersion within the gaming community (although I would argue that Oculus will have market control for the forseeable future).
My opinion is that the kind of augmented reality that we all dream of, that sort of matrix-like constant data download, won't become a reality until someone figures out how to take it (visibly) out of human interaction, i.e. with smart contacts, etc. The current tech is just too intrusive in normal human interaction. My understanding is that this kind of tech is still a long way off.
I'd love to be wrong though!
The glass front allows these holograms to appear more naturally to the user all the while still being aware of your surroundings.
The real challenge is not the hardware, but the software and "experiences".
Google Glass was to be used in personal interactions and that put a social barrier in the way of what was some cool technology. It seems that it was way too awkward to be 'glassing' in public no matter how useful or cool the technology was.
HoloLens is pitched to be used in the home and in the workplace, where you can comfortably immerse yourself in that experience without the social implications. This allows the technology to be judged on its own without mixing in the social implications.
I have high hopes for this, at least its a very different experience than what most others are doing (though its obviously taking cues from VR, augmented reality/Google glass etc.)
I agree for this to get 'really big' the form factor has to be a lot more portable, but this is a great stop-gap.
But we're just not there yet tech-wise. And there have to be some intermediate steps along the way (i.e. big ugly glasses/goggles) because it's just going to be too hard to make it commercially viable to go directly to smart contacts.
What Google has shows is that the public won't accept this until it's _awesome_ (and Glass was not awesome). So perhaps the gaming route (Oculus/MSFT) is the path we'll have to take.
My sci-fi holy grail for this type of thing is a brain-machine interface in the form of a simple hat.
Early versions may look like this: http://i.imgur.com/y3v6hxB.jpg
I'm curious what the price tag will be? Battery life?
Sound is easy enough - a pair of decent headphones can produce fairly decent 3D sound, and combined with the illusion of depth provided to your visual system, I suspect it will be extremely convincing.
Q: Will HoloLens be priced as a consumer product?
Nadella: It'll be priced for both enterprise and consumers to use it.Think this - size-adjustable holo keyboard, ergonomic natural of course.
-working in restricted spaces like planes
-shared gaming worlds
-CAD/architecture/3d sculpting at 'real' size
-virtual help (wired gives example of remote help with electrics)
-home improvement (virtual paint/furniture)
-weirdo ghost in the shell style window management
And it seems like a pretty good use case here.
"he is trying to see Project HoloLens as if for the first time" This is a rather significant problem when talking about the real world as per the article. Consider the electrician discussion in the article. Real electricians want / need / expect real tools, not noob friendly fisher price toys.
Its a tool for camp. As wikipedia says "based on deliberate and self-acknowledged theatricality." And camp doesn't appeal to everyone, all the time. If they were making a UI based on camp in a cultural era of camp ascendance, lets say the late 60s, early 70s in the USA, then this would be a win, it would be "groovy", it would be "boss". But... it isn't.
Another way to describe it is ergonomic problems. I'm used to expressing myself, however poorly, staccato finger gestures at 104 keys at a desk at 100+ WPM. Any failure is a failure of my own creativity, not the user interface of my keyboard, which seems fairly capable in better hands... Now I must downshift and do interpretive dance, or gang hand symbols to communicate. No, I think not. Aside from gorilla arms problems limiting duration and comfort (no 12 hour shifts at the computer, for better or worse). And the speech interface limits it to quiet home use, while alone.
The optical technology sounds incredibly impressive, I'd love to play Minecraft wearing it. Or Forza, or a zillion other games. Its just the UI that sounds truly awful.
This isn't the end-game. It's going to be slightly weird, but the potential is there.
I think the jury is still very much out on this. Personally, I hate VR. Its claustrophobic, asocial, dizzying, and I do not like the idea of giving software my entire field of view either. Cheap HMDs are going to be nice, but I don't know how well they're going to do outside the hardcore gamer demographic. I can't imagine watching a movie with friends with each of us wearing these things or even playing a console game with the other players in the room.
AR gaming, on the other hand, isn't something that gets much press, but I can really see some novel uses. Imagine playing something like "Gone Home" but in your home. Clues hidden in your real-life closets, drawers, etc. Or peering into the mirror in your bathroom and seeing the main characters face instead of yours. Or something in the background that's not really there.
I don't think we should write it off so quickly; it's like saying "Text messages are pointless, they don't carry inflections and emotion like phone calls. I can't see myself texting anyone." There are things you can do in real life but not in VR and there are things you can do with VR that you can't do in real life.
Where is your imagination racing to?
This sounds amazing! She didn't go into a ton of details on this, so I wonder if it's as cool as I imagine.
If done well it could be a game changer for 3D printing (and a "killer app" for many families).
Is that a killer app, I guess not, but if this HoloLens device is really running Windows 10, and the API's are baked into the OS, that puts it MILES ahead of where Google Glass was, and developers will be able to do something more interesting than take photos and share them on Google+.
As a developer, having a wall of holographic desktop screen space in front of me would be amazing. My home office would look much better too!
I have no idea how far away this version of HoloLens is from that reality though.
If the Oculus Rift is any indication-- This is still a long ways away, unfortunately.
It's what I first thought of when I tried the Youtube app on Google Cardboard. The app has you in a theater with a main viewing screen, but then littered 360 degrees around you are other videos you can watch or cycle through.
All I could think was how awesome it would be to have half a dozen virtual screens (that I could manipulate) for programming. It would well justify the cost of a good device because six monitors would be probably just as expensive.
I think it would be very cool to just have 3 tripods on your desk (a ball on a stick) that represent 3 screen spaces. You could reach out and move them around, telescope them up and down in the physical world and the headset could use them for triangulation to render an accurate monitor on each. You'd still have a keyboard and mouse in the first iteration and then slowly overtime give way to other forms of input.
Given something more adaptive, there's no reason you couldn't have a ginormous holographic wraparound workspace... or whatever your imagination can come up with.
'can respond at frequencies up to 150 Hz or higher in response to individual action potential pulses of less than 3 milliseconds'
Sadly the video player is horrible, and I didn't see this video on YouTube.
I know that this tech could do so much more (one giant display the size of the wall) but the different displays is nice bec it allows me to silo things into different categories.
A good keyboard only UI (I don't trust small scale pointer input), and you could move the entire traditional PC interface over into a very discreet package.
The web would be the one place where changing UI paradigms would be hard, the web pretty much insists on fine motor skills clicking one of hundreds of visible links on a page.
That would be a major market for this technology.
Can you expand and maybe source that comment. "Initially funded" to me suggests that the R&D was funded by people/companies for the purpose of carrying pornography.
"Popularised by" is often suggested, or even "first exploited commercially for" - either of these seem far more likely. I just can't see Daguerre, or whoever (Wedgewood, Fox-Talbot, ..), getting pay-checks from people/companies that want to publish porn?
I'm not saying, yet, that you're wrong - history is often surprising.
By wire recordings you mean the audio recordings on wires that predate reel-to-reel and such. Are there existing audio porn recordings from the 1890s? It seems strange with the cost of the tech that anyone would even want it as a recording when the people who could afford it, given the massive difference in income and the availability of prostitutes, could order a live rendition. Stranger things have happened though.
Telegraph? Morse or semaphore porn, ... I'd have thought that was really an exception to Rule 34!?
Pray tell, more details.
THAT FEELS GOOD STOP NO DONT STOP STOPVirtuix Omni is a hack to make Oculus physically immersive: http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/11/4419832/virtuix-omni-vr-ha...
Normally you'd need a large open space (and a forklift) to demonstrate the product but with this? You could do it in a large room.
I think this is actually the killer app for anyone too.
Imagine shopping at Amazon and being able to manipulate a product in your hands before you buy? Want to buy studio monitors for the PC but don't know where to place them? Whip out your HoloLens and put them wherever you want!
How would that piece of art look on your wall? What about the other wall over there?
IKEA? Hmm... which couch looks best in my living room?
Imagine seeing a marker shooting into the sky, like an old movie premier spotlight, that marked the locations of your friends and family? Or just anything.
At an amusement park and don't know where the nearest bathroom is? Follow the blue arrows on the ground and you'll find it.
The possibilities are endless.
Since images are formed on your retina by focusing real lightfields, a true holographic display which produced a complete lightfield would be much more realistic and comfortable to view than a flat stereoscopic image is.
In any event I don't think that the "holographic" goggles are actually projecting a complete lightfield. I'm pretty sure they just shine two more-or-less normal images into your eyes although the math to compute those images might, uh, be holographic.
> To create Project HoloLens’ images, light particles bounce around millions of times in the so-called light engine of the device. Then the photons enter the goggles’ two lenses, where they ricochet between layers of blue, green and red glass before they reach the back of your eye. “When you get the light to be at the exact angle,” Kipman tells me, “that’s where all the magic comes in.”
Back to the AR subject, I much prefer AR over true matrix style VR. Let us stay in the real world, move about the real world, extend it with the virtual.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Rainbows-End-Vernor-Vinge/dp/081253636... [2] http://www.amazon.com/A-Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/081253...
[Edit: Grammar]
I wanted to buy some to develop on, but they didn't really seem to have their act together.
I mean, it made immediate sense it's a cash cow, but long-term Minecraft is perfect, it's simple, easy, forgiving and fun - a perfect entrance into VR/AR
I also feel that the videos give a very misleading sense of what it will look like to see someone using something like this. Unless, I suppose, they have worked out the "shared" experience would be like. (That is, two of these in the same room.)
More closeup picture of the device in that link. There's some sort of camera/light emitter above the left and right eyes. Two panes, and some sort of smaller HUD in front of the right (and left?) eyes, but it actually might be a part of the second glass pane.
Looks like Microsoft has just upped the virtual reality goggles race. My mind is racing with excitement over all of the applications this could serve. The tech behind how these glasses actually work is also pretty clever, I don't entirely understand it, but it seems to be more than just a OLED diplay, lenses and a driver like existing solutions. I legitimately feel more excited for this than I have been for Oculus and Morpheus.
Another little clever thing Microsoft have done here is calling it a holographic headset, not a VR headet. The different wording not only separates Microsoft from other competitors refering to their headsets as virtual reality headsets but it also makes much more sense (from a technical and branding perspective).
This will no doubt have some incredible applications, most of which augment reality. Not quite the same goal as Occulus.
I bought an oculus and am excited by VR because teleportation IS FREAKING AWESOME. AR is cool, but a far cry from the sense of presence that we talk all day about in VR land.
I also think this could be a short-term way to introduce full-body physical constraints in full-on virtual reality. (In the more distant future, we will probably know how to stimulate the brain directly to produce these sensations.) I envision a full-body suit (fitted to the user with near perfection) with a bunch of cables going in every direction. So if you try to push a virtual wall, the proper cables will be set to resist. Doesn't seem very practical, but the glove version might be.
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"Does it work? Yes, it works. Is it any good? That's a much harder question to answer."
"I say this in the nicest way possible: Using Microsoft HoloLens kinda stinks. In its current form, it feels like someone is tightening your head into a vice. The model being shown today on Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus isn't what you saw onstage, but a development kit. The demos begin by lowering a tethered, relatively small, rectangular computer over your head, which hangs around your neck by sling."
"You can literally feel the heat coming off the computer's fans, which face upward. It feels like you're wearing a computer around your neck, because you are."
There doesn't seem to be full hand tracking (as suggested by the demo on stage). Instead it uses something they call AirTap which uses gaze for pointing and hand only for clicking:
"By looking at any of them and using "AirTap" (hold up your hand in front of your eyes, tap with your pointer finger), I could select any contact to call."
"While the effects of interaction were impressive, the actual interaction was less so. Rather than picking up a sheep with my hand by literally just grabbing it with my actual hand, my only means of interaction were voice (pickaxe! redstone torch! etc.) and the aforementioned "AirTap."
Overall impression is kinda mixed (especially compared to how well were received even very crude Oculus Rift early prototypes):
"HoloLens is clearly very early, and kinda sucks right now. It's uncomfortable. It's cumbersome. It looks and feels like a piece of hardware that's far from final."
"Is it bad? No. Lord no. Stop it. It's very impressive, but it's a brand new entry in a market that basically doesn't exist yet."
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http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/21/microsoft-hololens-hands-...
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Given Engadget description of the actual device, here is a screenshot from Microsoft promotional video that probably captured it:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B76axLVIUAA4egZ.png:large
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPmAwvmOXKM&t=12m21s
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Another journalist impressions (Andy McNamara from Game Informer):
"Important first impression. In the videos I thought it filled your entire field of view, but it's more like a screen floating in space."
"I'd say it's like a 16x9-ish monitor floating about 7 to 8 inches just in front of your face."
https://twitter.com/GI_AndyMc/status/558039828328357888
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Gizmodo report was more enthusiastic, especially about ability of display to hide real view, though noted "tiny" field-of-view:
"It's one of the most amazing and tantalizing experiences I've ever had with a piece of technology."
"It's not like the Oculus Rift, where you're totally immersed in a virtual world practically anywhere you look. The current Hololens field of view is TINY! I wasn't even impressed at first. All that weight for this? But that's when I noticed that I wasn't just looking at some ghostly transparent representation of Mars superimposed on my vision. I was standing in a room filled with objects. Posters covering the walls. And yet somehow—without blocking my vision—the Hololens was making those objects almost totally invisible."
http://gizmodo.com/project-hololens-hands-on-incredible-amaz...
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Verge folks also liked it:
"... you look down at the coffee table and there's a castle sitting right on the damn thing. It's not shimmery, but it's not quite real, either. It's just sitting there, perfectly flat on the table, reacting in space to your head movements. It's nearly as lifelike as the actual table, and there's no lag at all. The castle is there. It's simply magic."
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/21/7868251/microsoft-hololens...
The demo on stage clearly mentioned that you used your gaze to select and then tapped with your finger. Which is also exactly what we saw the lady on stage doing.
Of course, the naysayer in me is just thinking this is a PR move to tell investors and stakeholders everything is alright and that MS got their backs covered by stepping into the future. Which is not that unusual, Google and Amazon are doing it too.
Think of it like this: can't afford an iphone? There's a Holographic iPhone you can download. Can't afford a fancy big screen TV, there are thousands out there you can download, etc.
This will all depend on the quality / ease of use of Holographic Windows, but I can already see it's the future of computing.
Also, I still own an iPhone 5 and don't have a particularly fancy TV...
Your same argument has been made (to a greater or lesser degree) with the advent of the industrial revolution, the Internet, cheap processors, 3D printers. There is no technology that will make wealth obsolete.
I'm curious if this technology is closer to oculus rift than to google glass.
I'm thinking maybe they use a front-facing camera to capture the scene and render the 3D stuff on top of the camera view? a user simply sees the composite scene via a display similar to oculus rift.
-field of view is extremely limited. There's a rectangular area in the center of your vision that acts as your "window"
-image was relatively transparent
-HoloLens is clearly very early, and kinda sucks right now.
Notice that on all the video calls they show the other person isn't wearing one?
(That and it is rather ugly, too.)
Seems like a strong use-case but how will they render people on the call if participants are wearing a headset?
Now lets hope .Net also becomes 'cool' to use among developers. The current perception is pretty bleak.
HoloLens does the same but if you believe their product video: you _are_ an idiot.
In this case, the product is a "moonshot" at changing the UI.
No wait, the product is a PR event that just says. "We can innovate too, you know"
If this fails, they will be late again in canceling a VR/Augmented reality product that should not have made it past beta. See Glass, Google.