I'm not one to be easily impressed by technology and I must say the hololens is incredibly incredibly impressive. We have a couple at the office and whenever I spend time with one I'm really taken aback at what this will become. I like VR, but the augmentation between the physical and the virtual is what I'm most excited about. I mean it when I say, at least for me, hololens really changed my frame of reality. I feel like I sound kinda fanboi and overly enthusiastic, but I encourage you to try and find a way to use one if you've not. (trying it for the first time: http://john.je/iDpX)
I am really impressed with the Hololens myself. I bought one. It is still not quite there. The FOV is way, way too narrow, the Resolution is too low for serious work, and gestures are not very accurate.
I've also found that the device itself becomes uncomfortable after wearing it for a short period. I have however worn it for more than 2 hours in a row once or twice.
My niece (6 years) loved it so much she kept playing with it for hours also; She played Roboraid or just placed holograms in the living room like little dolls. Took me 10 minutes to clean up :-).
Not everybody I've had try it, were as impressed, and I think most people I've shown it to, think of it as a gimmick.
I don't think a lot of 'lenses will find their way under the Christmas tree this year. Too expensive. But if they got the price down around the cost of an iPad, it would blow the success of iPad away -- Even in the 'lense's current form...
It is another one of those things that indicate that Microsoft is on the right path as a tech company. Now, where is Apple's AR product?
It will come. There's no way they're not developing something. There's all the articles about the patents they have and what not. Tim Cook has commented on AR vs VR. But, in typical Apple fashion, they'll announce it out of nowhere and tell you can buy it NEXT WEEK!
I don't like "first experience with Tech X" sort of videos because with AR and VR there is just so much going on that is new and novel to the user that there is no chance to stop and actually evaluate the technology on its merits.
I want a great AR system, but no such device exists. I've had a Hololens for about 3 months now, on loan from a client that asked me to build an app for them. If Hololens is at all any indication of the current state of the art (and Magic Leap is officially on its sixth year of childishly teasing "we got a secret and we ain't telling"), then this tech is easily 5 years away from being consumer ready. This is not even to the usability level of the Oculus DK1 yet. There are zero usable apps because there is zero way to usably interact with apps. The Hololens is an incredible feat of engineering. But I'll stick to VR for now. It's usable now and there are customers now.
I'm not sure what that link you posted is. Even after adding 15 uMatrix rules I couldn't get it to work (whitelisted everything that wasn't tracking i.e. Google Analytics, Segment, ShareThis).
> Even after adding 15 uMatrix rules I couldn't get it to work (whitelisted everything that wasn't tracking i.e. Google Analytics, Segment, ShareThis).
Wouldn't it just be easier to disable uMatrix temporarily for his site? That being said the site just brings up an error page for me too.
"Holoportation is a new type of 3D capture technology that allows high-quality 3D models of people to be reconstructed, compressed and transmitted anywhere in the world in real time. When combined with mixed reality displays such as HoloLens, this technology allows users to see, hear, and interact with remote participants in 3D as if they are actually present in the same physical space."
It says it now requires 30 - 50 Mbps, I would assume relative or this compression algorithm is the real story here. Though, it could of been uncompressed bitmaps or something to begin with.
So this "transports" you from inside a moving vehicle to a conference anywhere in the world, assuming the conference is happening with participants wearing Hololens.
It's crazy impressive, but it seems really far ahead of time for now. Crazy exciting, but does anyone know when things like this will be more practical, realistically?
Just like Apple believed and progressed towards facetime, Microsoft believed and is progressing towards teleconferencing with people visibly present in front of you.
The first publication of the idea of video-telephony, in fact came only a year or two after the telephone, and the first commercial video telephony service was available for public use in the 30's... People usually don't realise just how old that idea is...
Or how early it became viable on the internet - CU-SeeMee [1] was one of the first services I used on the internet, back in '93.
From what I know, the major blockers are battery life and unit cost. The battery life is decent (or so I read), but it's not near the "walking around" level.
Display area is also important, but that's a quality thing; there's just straight up things you can't do without enough battery life and given too much cost.
I think the real importance of this announcement is the reduction of needed bandwidth by 97% while still maintaining transmission quality - that's amazing!
I guess it doesn't amaze me at all without knowing a lot of details. I could write the most naïve format imaginable as a first draft and easily get a 99% reduction in a second version.
Nvidia and Microsoft continue to play friendly competitors in the AR space. Holoportation is quite similar to Nvidia's Virtual Eye tech, and MS [s]is using some of Nvidia's optics tech[/s] [EDIT: is using Nokia's tech to compete with Nvidias AR tech] in the Hololens. Could Nvidia get big enough that Microsoft wouldn't buy them?
There are no NVIDIA parts in the Hololens... It uses a ULV Intel processor with integrated graphics, along with what Microsoft calls a "holographic processing unit" which is built by Microsoft, but utilizes slightly customized Tensilica cores for DSP offload.
Nvidia's market cap is $50 billion, which is 5 times Microsoft's biggest acquisition, Skype at $8.5 billion.
Microsoft sources parts from many companies. They are a software company, not a hardware company, at their core. It's good to have partners with different markets. They don't need complete vertical integrations.
How does it work with N people ?
Do I see other with Vive or hololens on their head ?
or the head is actually "reconstructed", and in that case, the eyes are not tracked ?
This is the sort of thing that could spur on an interest in Windows as a mobile platform again. Imagine if someday you could "holoport" to meet and talk with people using your phone and a pair of glasses.
Of course, the article in question requires a setup in the car, which allows them to place cameras, and currently it still requires Wi-Fi grade signal for it to work.
If this holo tech gets real traction I'd hope (and expect) that they'd go cross-platform with iOS/Android as first class platforms. I like WinMo but its not exactly hoovering up market share from Apple and Android.
Microsoft seems a bit more pragmatic about multi-platform now. I'm sure the business model will revolve around running your holo-server on an Azure instance or running holo-skype meetings from your corporate Office 365 subscription tied to your corporate iPad. They are moving towards device/platform agnostic services. The lock-in is server side in the cloud :)
It is a Windows platform where you can place 2D windows in 3D space while some applications can display 3D graphics. You end up e.g. having a browser on one wall, a photos app on another wall, and a weather app on a third wall. It is not quite there yet, I think. But it is actually pretty cool!
For now, it feels like Microsoft is way ahead of Apple and Google on the OS side.
Windows Holographic is out there with end-users. Albeit with some/many shortcomings and obviously still being developed (like every other OS) -- I would compare it more to iOS 1.0, which was pretty stable but also had many short comings.
Apple and Google haves not released anything for end-users or even demoed anything... so I still feel Microsoft is ahead. Obviously, I don't know what Apple and Google are working on internally (or Microsoft for that matter).
I know this isn't exactly what you meant, but people have been able to run azure instances for the sharing service that the hololens can hook into. It's awesome, I'm so glad to have had the chance to work with the hololens and AR.
Sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had to whip up custom hardware to make it happen. I'd think you'd want 3D cameras on the phone, plus AR glasses that would need to be light enough for travel.
How ready is Holoportation to play around with? If I get a developers edition of the Hololense...could I recreate the guy with his kid in the room demo they did?
Found this paper, guess I'll read it on the train:
This account has been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments, but this one stands alone in its incivility. Since we prefer to ban accounts only after they've been warned, this is it. Please re-read the guidelines:
I'm sorry, but having reread the rules I don't see how my comment violates them. I think you don't exactly get the point of my comment, which was to show that the name "holoportation" wasn't chosen right, because, at least to me, it looks like a combination of "holocaust" and "transportation". I could've just pointed that out in that kind of wording, but I chose to package it in a joke instead.
Humor seems to be pretty hit-or-miss on HN, but when pressed I'd say my joke was funny, (though not that funny in hindsight), or, at the very least, not offensive (not every mention of the holocaust should be offensive, especially when it's a joke on the name of a Microsoft product). I also think it made a valid point on naming things: make sure that to someone who doesn't know the product, the name can only be read in one kind of way. I don't think my point got properly communicated though, and I'll try to prioritise clearness over humor from now on (on HN at least).
>This account has been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments
I post all my comments keeping the guidelines - which I had of course read before - in mind. Some of them seem to get a lot of downvotes, but it looks like that's just a matter of having unpopular opinions to me. If you do think my comments are bad or overly offensive (by HN standards), I'd like you to point out specific examples. Believe it or not, I don't like getting many downvotes either, but I also don't intend to suppress unpopular, but in my opinion valuable, opinions.
