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Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

arstechnica.com

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Re: Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

#11

Post by quanticle »

daveguy wrote: post #7
hacker_9 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the fox runs through objects that are even slightly complex, as it can't comprehend their depth (the camera woman). Another interesting depth issue is when it ran to the back of the table and straight on to the floor as if they were continuous, because the view angle made it so the table and floor were right next to each other only separated by a line, so the fox didn't do a jump animation. I suspect a depth map…

Good points. I was most impressed with the wall identification/ interaction. If you sent up a big empty room, then everything could be VR, except with a concept of where the ends are. So it would be a walkable immersive environment. But I agree, it is not to the point where the average consumer would be happy. Or they would probably be happier with a much cheaper standard low-quirk vr headset.

If you sent up a big empty room, then everything could be VR, except with a concept of where the ends are.

That, plus the collaboration features would make HoloLens pretty awesome for any kind of collaborative product design. Take cars, for example. Right now, car mockups are done in clay, and while clay is easier to mold than metal, it still takes time and limits your ability to iterate. But with Hololens, you can have a design review where each of the participants puts on an AR unit, and now you can all see the same car and make changes to it in real time.

I'm excited to see what sorts of applications will be opened up by being able to display virtual objects in a "real" setting. I also agree that this won't be consumer-facing technology (at first). This is the sort of thing that'll take off with architects and engineers before it takes off with "normal people".

Re: Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

#12

Post by kenjackson »

hacker_9 wrote: post #5
daveguy wrote: post #4

What I got from the video: The gaphics integration into the real world is phenomenal. If you put a virtual object in a room you can walk around it. If you put something on a wall it stays there no matter where you walk. Unfortunately, the interface -- how you interact with virtual objects -- is completely janky. Awkward pinching gestures to select keys from a floating virtual keyboard. Cursors that are supposed to re…

Also the fox runs through objects that are even slightly complex, as it can't comprehend their depth (the camera woman). Another interesting depth issue is when it ran to the back of the table and straight on to the floor as if they were continuous, because the view angle made it so the table and floor were right next to each other only separated by a line, so the fox didn't do a jump animation. I suspect a depth map…

Hmmm... Kinect creates a depth map. Not sure why they didn't use the same technology.

Re: Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

#13

Post by magicalist »

kenjackson wrote: post #12
hacker_9 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the fox runs through objects that are even slightly complex, as it can't comprehend their depth (the camera woman). Another interesting depth issue is when it ran to the back of the table and straight on to the floor as if they were continuous, because the view angle made it so the table and floor were right next to each other only separated by a line, so the fox didn't do a jump animation. I suspect a depth map…

Hmmm... Kinect creates a depth map. Not sure why they didn't use the same technology.

It does, you can see it in the first video (it appears to be quite more than a depth map and actually extracting geometry from it, which fits with what the SDK news has been).

Pure speculation, but I would bet that it generates the room geometry at startup and then doesn't change it later. The device has limited processing power and needs to hit a high frame rate, so doing that makes sense.

A person walking into the scene wouldn't be accounted for in that case. It's also dependent on scans of the environment and the quality of geometry reconstruction, so things like a gap between objects that you didn't see from a good angle could easily run into that issue.

Re: Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

#14

Post by djrogers »

I believe that this has way more chance to revolutionize human/computer interaction than anything Occulus is doing. Outside of specific areas (like gaming and certain types of video based entertainment), this type of AR/MR is much more useful than Rift style VR.

You can interact with others, your environment, and other systems without the isolation or nausea of VR. On top of that, being able to supplement the real world instead of only temporarily replacing it seems far more valuable to me.

Now we just gotta shrink it down to contact lens size, and we're good to go!

edited for formatting

Re: Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

#15

Post by 13of40 »

daveguy wrote: post #4

What I got from the video: The gaphics integration into the real world is phenomenal. If you put a virtual object in a room you can walk around it. If you put something on a wall it stays there no matter where you walk. Unfortunately, the interface -- how you interact with virtual objects -- is completely janky. Awkward pinching gestures to select keys from a floating virtual keyboard. Cursors that are supposed to re…

I think there are two fundamental reasons it's "janky":

1. It's version 1.

2. It's an interface that nobody's used before.

Neither of these is a mark against the technology.

Go ask a caveman to use a version 1 iPhone, and see if he falls in love with it or just trash-talks it on an internet forum.

Re: Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

#16

Post by orisitpr »

magicalist wrote: post #13
kenjackson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm... Kinect creates a depth map. Not sure why they didn't use the same technology.

It does, you can see it in the first video (it appears to be quite more than a depth map and actually extracting geometry from it, which fits with what the SDK news has been). Pure speculation, but I would bet that it generates the room geometry at startup and then doesn't change it later. The device has limited processing power and needs to hit a high frame rate, so doing that makes sense. A person walking into the…

This is incorrect -- it does constantly rescan the room and will detect someone moving through the environment. It doesn't do that super quickly, though, and it can be difficult to capture the geometry of a moving person accurately.

Re: Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

#17

Post by moron4hire »

djrogers wrote: post #14

I believe that this has way more chance to revolutionize human/computer interaction than anything Occulus is doing. Outside of specific areas (like gaming and certain types of video based entertainment), this type of AR/MR is much more useful than Rift style VR. You can interact with others, your environment, and other systems without the isolation or nausea of VR. On top of that, being able to supplement the real wo…

I don't see why VR should be isolating. Just because you're not immediately available to the people immediately around you doesn't mean you aren't available in a very personal way to many, many more people. VR is going to enable "face to face" communication across continents. It already has, it's just a matter if penetration now.

And VR doesn't cause nausea. Bad applications cause nausea.

Re: Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

#18

Post by m_mueller »

personjerry wrote: post #3
onetimePete wrote: post #2

This baby is very hungry. Room decoration - Nom. Gaming Nom. Fashion Industry. Nom. Gadget and Entertainment Industry (TV, Posters). Nom. Advertising Industry - and Self Expression. Nom. Next ten years will be spend with feeding everything to it. He who wraps the last layer around the world, to sell it to the users, makes everything wrapped his organelles over time. Well played Microsoft, well played. If we could dec…

I don't see it. Could you explain some of those industries? And the layers and organelles analogy? Also (and especially) the wifi point, I didn't get how that related at all.

I think P is assuming that these kinds of gadgets will rely for a while on processing done somewhere else closeby in order to shrink them further, sort of the Apple Watch crutch. This assumption misses the problem you have with latency - the refresh rate of VR/AR needs to be extremely tight for these objects to really stay in one place when you walk around at even a modest pace. So the limiting factor isn't just processing power and weight, it's power+weight+latency+price that you need to balance, with hard limits on latency and weight.

Re: Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

#19

Post by RangerScience »

...Dayum. And I say that working in AR. That is /solid/ tracking - although the "I'm a competitor" in me feels compelled to point out that this was done in a room specifically set up for it. Your mileage /will/ vary in your own spaces, but still... damn, that's good tracking.

Re: Hands-on with HoloLens: On the cusp of a revolution

#20

Post by RangerScience »

djrogers wrote: post #14

I believe that this has way more chance to revolutionize human/computer interaction than anything Occulus is doing. Outside of specific areas (like gaming and certain types of video based entertainment), this type of AR/MR is much more useful than Rift style VR. You can interact with others, your environment, and other systems without the isolation or nausea of VR. On top of that, being able to supplement the real wo…

You're only getting half the equation. Remember that the other half - the half that's not about the human - is the computer /understanding the space you're in/. This is software that understands there's a wall thing there, for whatever understanding of "wall" it has.
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