21–30 of 119 posts
I'd be impressed if someone could give me a grab bag of real world use cases for the mass market. I'm just super not convinced that this isn't a Kinect sitting on your face. And Lego/Minecraft on the tabletop.... no thanks I don't want games set in my lounge room, that's an incredibly boring place to set a game in.
TV replacement...Imagine having 5 large screen tv's in your living room watching every march madness game that is currently happening all at the same time.
I've been making apps on it since mid last year. It's an amazing device, the image stability and quality is very good and in a well-designed app the small FOV becomes an afterthought. Clicking/selecting objects with gaze is often an antipattern. Much better to use alternate input. Analytics is kind of a mess. Everybody recommends unity but performance will suffer. I wrote my own framework instead. Most of the open-so…
I demo'd google cardboard VR to a bunch of kids (prob about 200 ish) who thought it was amazing. They really enjoyed it and the feel from teaching them using VR was that this was another tool people will use in the future.
Kids are already wired up with headphones, phones in pockets, phones wired to external battery boosters. I say this because I thought cumbersome cables from phone to goggles would be a no no and the technology would have to wait for a wireless solution. But I think I am wrong, kids already have cables snaking around their bodies.
Personally I think external cameras that can show 'the outside world' inside the VR world is the future. I'm interested in your thoughts on AR... this I see as a great tool for industry, but not for the general public?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TV replacement...Imagine having 5 large screen tv's in your living room watching every march madness game that is currently happening all at the same time.
I have a tv.
To speculate, I'd say VR will find its killer app in gaming/entertainment (similar to TV), and AR will become the next great I/O interface between humans and computers (similar to phones/tablets).
I'd be impressed if someone could give me a grab bag of real world use cases for the mass market. I'm just super not convinced that this isn't a Kinect sitting on your face. And Lego/Minecraft on the tabletop.... no thanks I don't want games set in my lounge room, that's an incredibly boring place to set a game in.
Where's that bit? Where's that tool? How do I repair this thing? Who attached that bit to this thing.
From an application developer's perspective, the only difference between HoloLens coding and Mixed Reality coding is that when constructing 3D scenes your HoloLens app should have a transparent background so the person can see their room through the viewport because that's what they're buying the expensive headset for and in Mixed Reality you should have an opaque background because it's VR not AR.
The really big thing though is that $299 is roughly what you'd otherwise pay for a pair of big monitors. Full on virtual desktop support with floating windows for these devices is being shipped to every Windows 10 machine starting this week via Windows Update with the intent being you don't need old-school monitors just work in the headset, or with your monitors, or however you want.
Windows now has (or will shortly depending on your Windows Update timing) a built-in developer mode simulator for application testing of Mixed Reality code without a physical headset. The simulator is still a little buggy and incompletely undocumented (remember to shut it off when you're not using it) but it's pretty incredible and more than enough to start building and testing applications.
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/12/acer-microsoft-vr-mixed-...
[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality
HoloLens is cool but most of the HoloLens applications you write will be consumed on the $299 software-compatible Mixed Reality headsets that ship later this year (it's amazing how few people are paying attention to this announcement - Microsoft uses Mixed Reality as its branding but these are basically high end VR headsets with integrated tracking for a third the price of Rift and Vive devices)[0][1] From an applica…
Are you implying hololens could replace my monitors (in a practical sense I mean)?
I've been making apps on it since mid last year. It's an amazing device, the image stability and quality is very good and in a well-designed app the small FOV becomes an afterthought. Clicking/selecting objects with gaze is often an antipattern. Much better to use alternate input. Analytics is kind of a mess. Everybody recommends unity but performance will suffer. I wrote my own framework instead. Most of the open-so…
What is your development setup like? Do you have the hololens on while you are developing for it? Does the hololens do all the things a desktop computer can do, but in AR?
I have the hololens on about half the time. So I've spent a ton of time in it.
Yes surprisingly the Hololens is "just" an x86 Windows compile target. I've found a lot of software that "just works" as long as the UI isn't hardcoded.