Update: And here’s the video.
Microsoft has just revealed its next great innovation: Windows Holographic! It’s an augmented reality experience that employs a headset, much like all the VR goggles that are currently rising in popularity, but Microsoft’s solution adds holograms to the world around you. The HoloLens headset is described as “the most advanced holographic computer the world has ever seen.” It’s a self-contained computer, including a CPU, a GPU, and a dedicated holographic processor. The dark lenses up front contain a see-through display, there’s spatial sound so you can “hear” holograms behind you, and it also integrates a set of sensors. HoloLens, says Microsoft, will be available in the Windows 10 timeframe.
They showed Minecraft as a holographic world draped over your coffee table and the rest of the house. The user placed Minecraft TNT blocks on a real world, and detonated them to reveal a minecraft world behind the exploded wall. And so, much, more. And this is no tech demo: it’s working right now, and the people in the audience will be able to use it once the presentation is over. Even regular universal Windows applications can run inside this environment. Heck, they showed a simple holographic MS Paint-like application which allows you to create all kinds of fun holographic objects that you can manipulate with your hands. Scientists at NASA are using HoloLens to walk on Mars.
While this requires a clunky headset now, this can eventually power real holographic displays. This is so exciting. I’l add video once they’re up, but for now, Wired and Engadget have more.
The computing world seems incapable of understanding what an hologram really is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holography
Or “hologram” just sounds cooler than “3D image” or “VR” (which are too common nowadays), and once they adopt hologram for something it’s not it’s just PR garbage what follows.
The nice thing about (real) holograms is that they reproduce the light field of the object, and therefore to our eyes it is (ideally) indistinguishable from the real thing. Even including different focal planes, which one of the parts where 3D movies fail at (and makes it’s 3D effect kind of disconcerting and unnatural).
So 3D, virtual reality, etc. But we’re not at the holographic part yet!
Edit: Ha, there’s even a nice section of that wikipedia article “Things often confused with holograms”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holography#Things_often_confused_with_…
Edited 2015-01-21 19:44 UTC
Exactly ! People are so
DUUUUUUUUUUU
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Here is an other example of Virtual Reality, this Microsoft thing is nothing as a game changer !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rkOwhIxuhE
We have to walk a long road again before we get REAL holograms.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually think this looks pretty cool. And probably the benefit from actual holograms is pretty small compared to the effort to make them work in a way like this MS thing. But I just hate that they called it something that it’s not…
Exactly. Once the dust settles, people will see what this really is. An arguably clunkier, though somewhat more capable, version of Google Glass.
There are no holograms involved. And as with Google Glass, nobody is going to actually use this.
Heh, I corrected Eugenia once on the usage of “holographic”, with a few nice YT links of how REAL holograms look like… http://www.osnews.com/thread?492454
But it’s probably a lost battle
– see how “holographic” is again used in another recent news piece: http://www.osnews.com/story/28245/Microsoft_is_ready_to_be_loved_ag…
At the end of the video on Engadget, the dog is a “hologram” as well.
Microsoft Bob on Steroids? Ok okay, a bit cooler than that but still.
Now this thing seems truly cool. Would love to get my hands on one of those.
Windows 10 marketing department has been busy. This will be more crappy than you believe.
i know it sounds cynical but after seeing the quick logo at the end for Windows 10 the first thing that popped into my mind was announce some amazing vapourware that will get people raving about win10 as well as the holo project, at the end of the year after win10 release something 1/10th as good or don’t release anything at all.
However I’m really hoping I’m wrong and just jaded as i would love something like this, i know it’s not really a hologram but to have a new system with the UI built around our environment is mind blowing, yes you can see the early efforts in Google Glass but they just didn’t seem to push it in the same direction as the video, it would be nice to see the digital information fitting into the world around us, like the TV on the wall or the small building on the desk.
hopefully tech is starting to push boundaries again as the last couple of years feel a little stagnated.
The first thing that popped into my head was Microsoft Bob (see my earlier post)…so you’re not the only one.
Interesting. But I wonder how does a BSOD look like in/with this virtual reality thingy.
So, what’s with the newspeak about this holo thing? It’s augmented reality, not holography, use the proper terms and call it what is. It’s very annoying.
At least they’ll be able to say later on that they’ve already “done that” in 2015, duh.
Strabismus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strabismus) can take several forms such as cross-eye or wall-eyed. My particular case is that lazy-eye but with both eyes. My right eye is dominate but I can change to either eye. The upshot of this is that I don’t see 3 dimensionally because I can’t focus both eyes on the same object. There are quite a number of people with this condition. I have tried to use various 3D systems and all they do is give me a head ache. With this kind of condition, why in the world would you make a computer interface that did that? If this is more than just a toy for Microsoft, I hope they allow a person to shut it off and use the current 2D interface.
Just my 2 cents.
There are a lot of ways our eyes determine distance; the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception lists all of them. Importantly, that list distinguishes monocular cues from binocular cues. Current 3D TV/movies rely entirely on showing a different image to each eye, so they don’t work well at all for people like you or me who only use one eye at time. AR or VR systems like the one in the article or the Occulus Rift use head-tracking to update the image in reaction to your movements allowing you to use motion parallax to notice that closer objects appear to move at a different speed compared to further objects.
More interestingly, this technology uses a light field display, which currently only exist in research prototypes. That means that the projected images will look appropriately blurry or sharp as you focus on real objects around them.
(Related, while you can’t buy a light field display, you can buy a light field camera ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytro ) which effectively lets you take a photo and then focus it later.)