Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 395 posts

Re: Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

#321

Post by danmaz74 »

imron wrote: post #293
shanselman wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. AR made and makes ZERO sense to my non-technical spouse and family. Holographic makes total sense. It's a clever rebranding and it will help sell ALL AR platforms, IMHO.

There are various times in history when vacuum cleaners, cell phones and browsing the web would have made ZERO sense to your non-technical family. 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.

Browsing the web - yes

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.

Re: Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

#322

Post by JetSpiegel »

hueving wrote: post #215
rubencodes wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note to self: Add to list of things I should make.

Hacker news comments probably aren't the best place to store personal notes.

Because "Make Holodeck" is such a personal and valuable idea

Re: Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

#323

Post by BobMarz »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #140

I think Microsoft re-branding Augmented reality as "holographic" is hugely impactful and, with the new wave of AR and CV products that are coming onto the market [1] might be the thing that makes people take it seriously. 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…

Its turned into shorthand for "seeing objects in space that aren't really there". They could have also gone with "compugraphic hallucinations" or "pink elephant computing".

Re: Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

#324

Post by lhl »

roywiggins wrote: post #266
discardorama wrote: post #161

I tuned out when I read this: "Sensors flood the device with terabytes of data every second, all managed with an onboard CPU, GPU and first-of-its-kind HPU (holographic processing unit)." 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 puf…

For that matter, what sensor can produce terabytes of data per second?

A single 4K2K RGBD sensor at a high enough refresh could generate something in the 100Gbps range. The device has at least 2 (possibly 4?) forward facing sensors. It's presumably also doing inward facing gaze tracking, audio and IMU.

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.

Re: Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

#325

Post by fauigerzigerk »

danmaz74 wrote: post #321
imron wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are various times in history when vacuum cleaners, cell phones and browsing the web would have made ZERO sense to your non-technical family. 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.

Browsing the web - yes 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.

How does "cell phone" explain anything useful about that particular type of phone? Using the word "cell" for a specific geographic area covered by a particular radio tower is itself a rather vague and general analogy. You could use "cell" for any element of a larger structure or organism I guess, but it wouldn't explain anything specific.

"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.

Re: Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

#326

Post by cmdkeen »

jballanc wrote: post #302
imron wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are various times in history when vacuum cleaners, cell phones and browsing the web would have made ZERO sense to your non-technical family. 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.

Sometimes people learn new words, other times keeping old words (usually modified) works better. To take your example, in Turkish the word for vacuum cleaner literally translates as "electric broom", and cell phones are commonly called "cep" which actually translates as "pocket". Or consider the British who still use electric torches (that's a flashlight for all you non-Brits).

We Brits also call a cell phone a "mobile phone" which describes perfectly what it is.

Re: Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

#327

Post by zaroth »

taeric wrote: post #231
crsna wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a car mechanic remotely helping you to do what's needed to be done. This use case is showcased in one of the videos and it is probably not as complicated as building an AI engine to help a user repair his car. This thing is really crazy!!

This is actually a relatively silly use case for this. A lot of the actual difficult things that a mechanic can do for you usually involve more strength than you have. Or just experience in actually working with things that they can't see. 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 si…

But the hologram need not be a person! At least, it won't be once this use case makes sense. The hologram, will be an AI hologram. Just like the light switch installation in TFA, it would be silly to have a human expert show you how to install a switch, or trade out a component in your car, once an AI expert will do.

Re: Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

#329

Post by zaroth »

I'm so excited to see this. I cannot wait to try one of these on for the first time. I'm going to bet writing apps for this kit will be a lot of fun.

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.

Re: Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

#330

Post by rndn »

tacon wrote: post #286
roywiggins wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that matter, what sensor can produce terabytes of data per second?

The CERN Large Hadron Collider sensors[0] (not head-mounted!) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

Thanks for the costume idea!
Post reply on HN