Microsoft announces a holographic headset

[SAWYER]

Wired hand's on
Wow!
"Another scenario lands me on a virtual Mars-scape. Kipman developed it in close collaboration with NASA rocket scientist Jeff Norris, who spent much of the first half of 2014 flying back and forth between Seattle and his Southern California home to help develop the scenario. With a quick upward gesture, I toggle from computer screens that monitor the Curiosity rover’s progress across the planet’s surface to the virtual experience of being on the planet. The ground is a parched, dusty sandstone, and so realistic that as I take a step, my legs begin to quiver. They don’t trust what my eyes are showing them. Behind me, the rover towers seven feet tall, its metal arm reaching out from its body like a tentacle. The sun shines brightly over the rover, creating short black shadows on the ground beneath its legs."


http://www.wired.com/2015/01/microsoft-hands-on/?mbid=social_twitter

I just watched a live demo on their Windows 10 stream, very cool stuff.

 

[Imp]

They stopped selling Google Glass last week or something... Sounds like a good plan then.

 

[Kaido]

This makes my eyeballs hurt:

http://o.aolcdn.com/dims-shared/dim...ff53c58dcf75bbc/201428290/windows+10+apps.jpg

 

[Markbnj]

This makes my eyeballs hurt:

That's just horrible. Maybe they need to open up the windows architecture enough that people can make distros. Then we could have one with an interface for normal people.

Edit: read the article.

Sensors flood the device with terabytes of data every second

 

[NikolaeVarius]

That's just horrible. Maybe they need to open up the windows architecture enough that people can make distros. Then we could have one with an interface for normal people.

Edit: read the article.

That's some awesome RAM they've got there.

 

[Markbnj]

That's some awesome RAM they've got there.

The overall project does seem very cool, so I guess we can forgive a little journalistic enthusiasm.

 

[rockyct]

They stopped selling Google Glass last week or something... Sounds like a good plan then.

It's more than an augmented reality device, it's an Occulus Rift type device, and I'm sure it didn't cost them $2 billion (price Facebook paid for Occulus Rift) to develop it.

I'm a bit skeptical about an VR devices, but it'll be interesting to see what comes to the market.

 

[darkewaffle]

That's just horrible. Maybe they need to open up the windows architecture enough that people can make distros. Then we could have one with an interface for normal people.

In practice it really isn't that different from a desktop with numerous jumbled columns of icons. Poor organization is cross platform lol.

 

[rockyct]

Here's a video of what they are trying to achieve:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aThCr0PsyuA

If they can make it work like the video, then I think they have something but it seems like that's a big if right now.

At least the headset is less fugly than Occulus Rift but people are going to look even more ridiculous than the Glassholes.

 

[darkewaffle]

Here's a video of what they are trying to achieve:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aThCr0PsyuA

If they can make it work like the video, then I think they have something but it seems like that's a big if right now.

At least the headset is less fugly than Occulus Rift but people are going to look even more ridiculous than the Glassholes.

Holy crap holographic minecraft is genius. People were wondering what they could do with the property, I think that is an awesome idea to capitalize on it and introduce the concept to the masses.

Also I think the applications of how it could help provide service or support to users remotely is pretty impressive. The article used the example of performing maintenance on electrical wires and the video shows plumbing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAKfdeOX3-o

Edit: Another HoloLens video MS put up

 

[SMOGZINN]

I don't really care how ugly the headset looks, as long as it is not too cumbersome to wear.

What I don't believe is that they can get anything even similar to the experience they just showed in the next decade. It would be super cool if they could, but I doubt that we will see anything even remotely like that.

 

[SMOGZINN]

Holy crap holographic minecraft is genius. People were wondering what they could do with the property, I think that is an awesome idea to capitalize on it and introduce the concept to the masses.

Also I think the applications of how it could help provide service or support to users remotely is pretty impressive. The article used the example of performing maintenance on electrical wires and the video shows plumbing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAKfdeOX3-o

Edit: Another HoloLens video MS put up

Think of the problems with that, the system has to be 3d scanning the world around you and then building a 3d model of the items of interest, all while approximating and filling in what it can't scan (like the far side of that pipe), and displaying that, all in real time. I don't think a consumer electronics device can have even remotely enough processing power to do something like that.

 

[quikah]

Think of the problems with that, the system has to be 3d scanning the world around you and then building a 3d model of the items of interest, all while approximating and filling in what it can't scan (like the far side of that pipe), and displaying that, all in real time. I don't think a consumer electronics device can have even remotely enough processing power to do something like that.

That is not how the plumbing demo worked. The guy just draws on the video feed and the user sees the arrows overlayed on top. It is augmented reality, not VR.

 

[SMOGZINN]

That is not how the plumbing demo worked. The guy just draws on the video feed and the user sees the arrows overlayed on top. It is augmented reality, not VR.

You are right, for some reason I thought the pipe was a 3d rendered virtual object, but after re-watching it I see that it was not. But even just overlaying the drawing on the tablet with the real world object has to take some serious processing chops. Somewhere in there it had to interpolate the images to a moving environment, find the object being interacted with and 'stick' the arrows on it in real time, unless the arrows are just being drawn into the field without caring if they actually line up with and remain on the object. In that case it is just a fancy version of a virtual whiteboard.

 

[T9D]

https://chaturbate.com/female-cams/

 

[ImpulsE69]

OK, this does indeed look like it has some potential.

Of course....now no one will ever actually interact with humans again.

 

[gorobei]

as others have said, its augmented reality with overlays for data/text and the promise of interactive positionally tracked 3d meshes.

utter pie in the sky OverPromise UnderDeliver.

the processing power required to track realworld orientations/translations and align 3d meshes in realtime doesnt exist for portable devices. hand tracking is still in its infancy and coordinating gestures with mesh surface and finger vectors is nowhere near close to proof of concept.

and no one is going to be able to walk around tethered to a pc with a gpu powerful enough to do any of these things. any mobile soc with enough gpu power will bleed a battery dry in less than an hour at any resolution high enough to even come close to "hologram".

while these things will eventually be great for 3d content creators(cad/3dcg animation/game dev/etc) it is at least a decade away from being ready for consumer usage. you can do simple lego style minecraft building, but the whole touch point manipulate paradigm is so far away as to be laughable. maybe windows 17, but not 10.

hell even oled transparent displays are nowhere near ready to overlay enough light to block out the real world.

at best this is ms laying down groundwork for a future AR/VR api. and even razor has come out first in that respect.

 

[ImpulsE69]

Well remember these aren't projecting holograms, they are simply displaying said 3D item on a visor in such a way that it looks like it is being projected elsewhere. Like throwing your voice. It is still just a display.

That being said, I am sure it is a long ways off from being consumer ready.

The article didn't really talk about if they were cabled up lugging a PC along with them or what the requirements of the source computer (was there one) were, but it did talk about the heat (or lack there of).

 

[Kaido]

Eventually I could see this technology being super awesome:

1. Replace all manuals for plumbing, DIY car repair, etc.

2. Replace your big screen TV

3. Replace your computer monitor

4. Educational stuff, especially for hands-on things like cooking

5. Games: Nerf, Minecraft, Hot Wheels, 3D "Incredible Machine" based on your floorplan, etc. Plus stuff like 3D mazes for your R/C quadcopter!

6. Making things like cleaning up fun by turning it into a game with timers, achievements, tracking, etc. for cleaning the floor, doing the laundry, etc.

7. Heads-up GPS for your car, along with object tracking for pedestrians & other cars (especially in foggy conditions via external laser radars), without having to retrofit your entire windshield. Same with boats & airplanes - fish tracking arrows, flight paths & visual walls for restricted areas, etc.

8. Immersive experiences like 3D movies, 3D tours for things like museums, and cool stuff like concerts. Bonus points for people who have physical disabilities, or even weren't born yet - wish you could go to U2's final concert, but you were born in 2025? Now you can!

A lot of it is going to depend on (1) the resolution of the device's screen (ex. if you want a 4K holo-monitor, you're going to need like a 30K headset for distance/sampling/etc.), and (2) having multiple Kinect beacons in each room of your house for high-resolution 3D tracking.

 

[Brovane]

Cool seems like a further advancement of what Musk was showing that SpaceX was using for launch vehicle design work a little over a year ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY

Look forward to seeing how this new produce develops for MS.

 

[Kaido]

and no one is going to be able to walk around tethered to a pc with a gpu powerful enough to do any of these things. any mobile soc with enough gpu power will bleed a battery dry in less than an hour at any resolution high enough to even come close to "hologram".

Eh, with stuff like OnLive, Citrix HDX, Teradici, etc. you can do high-resolution streaming to your screen, and the Wifi stuff is faster than Gigabit these days (in spec, anyway), so you don't necessarily need the processing power on the device itself, just access to a high-speed link. So if they sell an 8-core hub for all of the wireless Kinect beacons with a transcoder to send the calculated images to the headset, that would work (plus give you better battery life).

 

[Rakehellion]

That thing is ugly.

 

[Pocatello]

That thing is ugly.

So are early cell phones.

 

[gorobei]

Eh, with stuff like OnLive, Citrix HDX, Teradici, etc. you can do high-resolution streaming to your screen, and the Wifi stuff is faster than Gigabit these days (in spec, anyway), so you don't necessarily need the processing power on the device itself, just access to a high-speed link. So if they sell an 8-core hub for all of the wireless Kinect beacons with a transcoder to send the calculated images to the headset, that would work (plus give you better battery life).

the rendering power isnt the main problem, its the latency. the Occulus rift guys have determined the minimum non-nausea inducing tracking/reaction speed to be 90+ hz. so you need to be able to track and update the head view vectors and align the meshes in ~10 or less milliseconds. and that's without any additional spatial sorting required for hand tracking or the 3d projection required to align your finger vector with a real or virtual surface and determine intersection.
that sort of processing will never be done on mobile bandwidth to any server farm regardless of how big the farm is. the time intervals are just too small.

 

[quikah]

I don't know why you guys are claiming this is all impossible right now. Unless MS has pulled off some elaborate scam this is working now, albeit in a limited fashion. Just read the hands on reviews of the demos.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/21/7868251/microsoft-hololens-hologram-hands-on-experience

There is a CPU block you hang around your neck apparently.