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How does the Hololens 2 matter?

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Re: How does the Hololens 2 matter?

#21
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text readability in specific context was passable on the original so I think this should be pretty good! The problems are going to be more in that it’s not quite a desktop window manager yet. It’s not designed to be a screen replacement. That is coming in the next couple years, but the bumps you’ll experience to make it your environment involve implementing and establishing paradigms that don’t exist yet and are mayb…

It always surprises me how much these technologies try to run before they can walk. Giving people a great desktop experience equivalent to multiple high-end monitors just seems like the obvious first baby step. Everything else seems like fluff if they can't get that to be desirable.

You would think that, but as someone who has been in the Natural User Interface R&D field for a decade, I’ll tell you that this is what walking looks like. Our tools as of this year are just on the edge of being able to deliver what a consumer expects. Adding a 3rd dimension makes everything harder and none of the existing assets, let alone functional principals from the 2D world translate.

To get what you just called a baby step is an act of barn raising. By thousands of dedicated professionals, tinkerers, artists, scientists, and large corporations. If we could have willed the “baby step” into being before now we would have. Actually many people have, but then quickly notice what’s lacking and get back to raising the barn.

Here are a couple projects I pulled with a quick google. I have a bitbucket wiki with dozens of similar projects, some in AR, VR, projection mapped, single user parallax, with gesture tracking, with custom controllers, etc... This is definitely one of those problems where it's easy to imagine so people imagine it's easy. Maybe we need you to help! Get a spatial display of some sort and lets get to work!

https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

https://github.com/letoram/safespaces

Re: How does the Hololens 2 matter?

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you assume that electricians and mechanics don't have any 'high-level training'? Is it just because they didn't get a BS from Stanford? Tech schools are a thing - and many of them are very good. And apprenticeship has been around for millennia, and is a wonderful way for someone to learn a trade or craft.

I think the parent's point was that unskilled people could preform those tasks. For example, I could look at my breaker box with a hololens and it could shade in the deadly parts.

And the convenience of AR over an annotated picture is what makes the former much safer than the latter?

Re: How does the Hololens 2 matter?

#23

The UI for Hololens 1 was terrible. Having to hold your gaze perfectly at tiny buttons and trying to get the Air Tap to work successfully was super annoying. You'd think they'd be able to project your fingers into 3d space from your approximate eye location. Glad they've revisited those flaws!

To be fair, it was state of the art... five years ago. HoloLens 1 was an amazing feat of engineering. Yes, it was a terrible user experience, but we wouldn't have the latest hardware without it. As for projecting the fingers, it is possible. It's just not a great experience. Nose-pointer is a (application level) compromise. I've built apps in HL1 where direct hand gestures are essential. And it's definitely a master…

No question it was cutting edge, the spatial mapping feature worked 99.999 percent of the time, something which other platforms haven't come close to achieving.

Re: How does the Hololens 2 matter?

#24
> Microsoft recommends the holograms do not show any nearer than 85cm for the original Hololens - any closer and your eyes go all funky. Why? Because at that distance, some of the hologram is hanging off the side of one of your eyes, and not the other.

This is just comically wrong. The distance recommendations are related to the Vergence-Accommodation conflict. This is a much larger issue than objects getting cut out of the field of view, and the mistake calls into question the author’s knowledge of anything related to the topic.

Re: How does the Hololens 2 matter?

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the parent's point was that unskilled people could preform those tasks. For example, I could look at my breaker box with a hololens and it could shade in the deadly parts.

And the convenience of AR over an annotated picture is what makes the former much safer than the latter?

I would think so, when you consider the lack of convenience involved in the following steps:

- Realize that you should try to research which parts of your breaker box are deadly in the first place

- Find the model number on the breaker box

- Google it, and sift through the results to find relevant information about which parts to touch/not touch

The mental loops you have to jump through would convince most people not to try at all, and just call up a professional. An annotated picture would be just as good, but having the hololens understand what you're looking at and the context of your situation (no doubt a difficult set of problems to solve) would make a huge difference.

Re: How does the Hololens 2 matter?

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you assume that electricians and mechanics don't have any 'high-level training'? Is it just because they didn't get a BS from Stanford? Tech schools are a thing - and many of them are very good. And apprenticeship has been around for millennia, and is a wonderful way for someone to learn a trade or craft.

I think the parent's point was that unskilled people could preform those tasks. For example, I could look at my breaker box with a hololens and it could shade in the deadly parts.

Further to your point, make previously unemployable employable through augmented reality assistance.

Re: How does the Hololens 2 matter?

#27
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text readability in specific context was passable on the original so I think this should be pretty good! The problems are going to be more in that it’s not quite a desktop window manager yet. It’s not designed to be a screen replacement. That is coming in the next couple years, but the bumps you’ll experience to make it your environment involve implementing and establishing paradigms that don’t exist yet and are mayb…

It always surprises me how much these technologies try to run before they can walk. Giving people a great desktop experience equivalent to multiple high-end monitors just seems like the obvious first baby step. Everything else seems like fluff if they can't get that to be desirable.

A possible baby step is a household system of stationary cameras with a mobile Hololens. The stationary cameras observe and attempt to classify objects you hold and put away; you can also teach it objects you name. Kind of like a visual Mycroft/Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri The Hololens guides you to the objects when you can't recall where you left them.

Elderly, memory-impaired (dementia, Alzheimer's, etc.), households with children would find immediate use with the assistance, even with not-great accuracy: any kind of reminder that scores greater than zero success at finding misplaced objects would be welcome than the alternative of zero effective recall.

If only the battery life was better, then small business warehouses would find immediate use for these as merchandise locators, as a lot of them have very haphazard methods to lookup merchandise locations.

Re: How does the Hololens 2 matter?

#28

Very happy to see the holo lens improving. I'm hoping this can bring a growth in labour jobs which require technical skill for individuals who do not have any high-level training (e.g. electricians or mechanics). From a safety perspective, there is a lot that can be learned in envirnments like power plants, oil refineries or factories.

Why would you assume that electricians and mechanics don't have any 'high-level training'? Is it just because they didn't get a BS from Stanford? Tech schools are a thing - and many of them are very good. And apprenticeship has been around for millennia, and is a wonderful way for someone to learn a trade or craft.

Classism runs strong in the tech industry.

Re: How does the Hololens 2 matter?

#29

Very happy to see the holo lens improving. I'm hoping this can bring a growth in labour jobs which require technical skill for individuals who do not have any high-level training (e.g. electricians or mechanics). From a safety perspective, there is a lot that can be learned in envirnments like power plants, oil refineries or factories.

My brother (a welder) had to constantly correct design flaws by the architects and engineers involved so education is something but not everything. This ranged from having to "fix" the specified measurements to ordering more material because the highly educated apparently faltered on that note.

[deleted]

Re: How does the Hololens 2 matter?

#30
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always surprises me how much these technologies try to run before they can walk. Giving people a great desktop experience equivalent to multiple high-end monitors just seems like the obvious first baby step. Everything else seems like fluff if they can't get that to be desirable.

A possible baby step is a household system of stationary cameras with a mobile Hololens. The stationary cameras observe and attempt to classify objects you hold and put away; you can also teach it objects you name. Kind of like a visual Mycroft/Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri The Hololens guides you to the objects when you can't recall where you left them. Elderly, memory-impaired (dementia, Alzheimer's, etc.), household…

That is doable right now. I am only sort of being glib here. I just want to outline what's involved in what people think is a simple task in a spatial system.

TLDR: As of right now, your wildest dreams are pretty possible. In the next 2 years, how we compute is going to get strange. Nothing is nearly as simple in an XR environment as a traditional computing one and currently most people don't really want what they'd ask for. Building a simple (useful) XR app makes launching a web product look like assembling a lego set vs. landing on the moon.

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Imagenet[0] works just fine for the object identification. You would probably want to use RGBd sensors like the kinect[1] or Intel Realsense[2] instead of regular cameras, but tracking like what the Vive[3] uses could also work. The thing you just proposed would involve a network of server processes handling the spatial data and feeding extracted relevant contextual information to a wireless headset at a pretty crazy rate. Just to give you an idea a SLAM[4] point cloud from a stereo set of cameras or a cloud from a Kinect2 or Realsese produces a stream of data that is about 200mb a second. Google Draco[5] can compress that and help you stream that data at 1/8 the size without any tuning.

Extracting skeletal information from that is really something that only Microsoft has reliably managed to deliver and it's at the core of the Kinect/Hololens products. NuiTrack[6] is the next best thing, but registering a human involves a T-Pose and gets tricky. Definitely you could roll something specific to the application, maybe just put a fiduciary marker[7] or two on a person and extrapolate skeleton from knowing where it is on their shirt. You will also want to be streaming back the RGBd, IMU, hand and skeletal tracking from the headset back to the server. This could help inform and reduce the tracking requirements from the surrounding sensors.

Out of the box, you'd probably need a base i7, 64Gb+ of ram, and a couple GTX 1080s to power 4 sensors in one room. The task of syncing the cameras and orienting[8] them would be something you'd have to solve independently. After having all of that, you would have an amazing lab to reduce the problem further and maybe require less bandwidth, but very probably to get where you're going you'd need to scale that up by 2x for dev headroom and maybe run some sort of cluster operations[9] for management of your GPU processes and pipeline. Keeping everything applicable in memory for transport+processing would be desirable so you'd want to look at something like Apache Arrow[10]. At this point you are on the edge of what is possible at even the best labs at Google, Microsoft, or Apple. The arrow people will gladly welcome you as a contributor! Hope you like data science and vector math, because that's where you live now.

After getting all of this orchestrated, you now have to stream an appropriate networked "game" environment[11] to your application client on the hololens, but congrats! You made a baby step! Battery life is still an issue, but Disney Research has demonstrated full room wireless power[12].

Now all you have to do is figure out all the UI/UX, gesture control, text entry/speech recognition, art assets, textures, models, particle effects, post processing pipelines, spatial audio systems[13], internal APIs, cloud service APIs, and application build pipeline. The Unity asset store has a ton of that stuff, so you don't have to get in the weeds making it yourself but you will probably have to do a big lift on getting your XR/Holodeck cluster processing pipeline to produce the things you want as instantiated game objects.

Once that's done, you literally have a reality warping metaverse overlay platform to help people find their car keys.

What's crazy is that you can probably have all of it for under $15,000 in gear. Getting it to work right is where the prizes are currently living and they are huge prizes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImageNet

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kinect-dk/

[2] https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense

[3] https://www.vive.com/us/vive-tracker/

[4] http://webdiis.unizar.es/~jcivera/papers/pire_etal_iros15.pd...

[5] https://github.com/google/draco

[6] https://nuitrack.com/

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzlsvFN_5HI (markers are on the boxes not the robot)

[8] https://realsense.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/63/Mult...

[9] https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/manage-gpus/scheduling-gpus...

[10] https://arrow.apache.org/

[11] https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UNetClientServer.html

[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn7T599QaN8

[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics

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