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Hands-On with Microsoft's New Holographic Goggles

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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has become forgotten as the public perception of Glass became dominated by the whole "glassholes" phenomenon, but the Explorer Program was supposed to demonstrate that people could think up these kind of amazing life-altering apps that proved the utility of bothering to wear Glass. They didn't. Years later, the reason to wear Glass remained "take pictures/videos hands free and shave 3 seconds off the time it tak…

The main application that sells it is likely to be less specialised than the cool demos, which are always a bit niche (modelling industrial design for motorbikes etc). 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…

This is the clear winner for me. A portable, wireless keyboard + hololens = the biggest virtual desktop in the world that also doesn't shut you out from reality / coworkers / your desk / etc. Whether or not the more ambitious use-cases ever materialize, I'd be happy to trade in my macbook for this.

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

#292
post #85
post #62

What is the killer app that will get people to go out and buy these? I don't think Holo Studio is it. Where is your imagination racing to?

Minecraft

Hmm... HoloLens + Minecraft = Oasis Console? [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One

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

#293

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…

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.

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

#294

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…

It will work. Until somebody comes up with an actual holographic device. I hope the name rights won't be gone by then...

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

#295
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtual, not wireless ;) Think this - size-adjustable holo keyboard, ergonomic natural of course.

For any serious work (coding), I'd still greatly rather use a laptop with a real keyboard.

Why the laptop? With the AR overlay you just need a keyboard.

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, the light is not merely being projected or reflected, but dispersed on a coordinate system, so the display actually illuminates where it was transparent before. That would interfere with natural light coming through (it's tinted as well) allowing the 'hologram' to obscure the real world. I could be wrong, though.

Unless there is some curious property of light I don't understand (and given my perplexity at radial polarization, there may well be), there's no way that external light coming into the glasses can be diminished by internal light emitted by the glasses. 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 sam…

Yet the demo videos show some virtual objects that are darker than their background. That may be vaporware. So far, there seem to be no images on-line actually taken through the device. Has anyone seen any?

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.

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

#297

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…

>even though it is technically wrong. 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.

Oculus VR is the name of the company. Oculus Rift is the name of the product.

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

#298
post #293

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.

True, but that word is pretty clearly gonna be Hologram. Augmented Reality isn't as fun to to as as Hologram or Kleenex.

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this type of AR / holographic technology has many, many more potential real-world applications than VR. With VR, you're shutting yourself off from the outside world. Here, you're enhancing the outside world with technology. You still get to interact with others. Using HoloLens doesn't stop you from doing almost anything. What I'm curious to find out is whether HoloLens will run into the same core problem as G…

It's hard to understand how AR / holographic technology could help people in their day-to-day life. There are a zillion potential uses, but all of them seem extremely complicated and hard to pull off. 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 wh…

Making it easier to find your car in a large parking lot would be a start.

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

#300

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…

A current generation Hawsell chip can easily manage terabytes per second in on-chip cache and by manipulating registers.

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.

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