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Hands On With Microsoft's Holographic Goggles
First time accepted submitter mkukuluk writes Forget Google Glass — Jessi Hempel describes the amazing experience she had with the new Holographic goggles from Microsoft. From the article: "The headset is still a prototype being developed under the codename Project Baraboo, or sometimes just “B.” [inventor Alex] Kipman, with shoulder-length hair and severely cropped bangs, is a nervous inventor, shifting from one red Converse All-Star to the other. Nervous, because he’s been working on this pair of holographic goggles for five years. No, even longer. Seven years, if you go back to the idea he first pitched to Microsoft, which became Kinect. When the motion-sensing Xbox accessory was released, just in time for the 2010 holidays, it became the fastest-selling consumer gaming device of all time.
Right from the start, he makes it clear that Baraboo will make Kinect seem minor league."
writing a science fiction book doesn't qualify as prior art.
Not bullshit at all. Kinect's first couple of months on sale were extremely successful. In fact, MS made a very nice slug of money from it; unusually for the console business, there was a hefty chunk of profit margin on each unit sold. And it sold a lot of units very fast, because it was never supply constrained; unlike many new console launches, if you wanted one, you could walk into a shop and buy one (supply shortages have limited early sales of the PS2, Wii and PS4 to a large extent, early sales of other consoles to a lesser extent).
Of course, the Kinect basically went on to traverse (on a slightly smaller scale) the same kind of curve of the Wii. Lots and lots of early sales, but faltering when people started to realise that the only games you could practically play on it were short-lived party-games. So after the first few months on sale, sales fell of a brick and games releases dried up. But MS had a lot of sales and made a lot of money in the window before that.
And in what the hell sense is the Xbox brand a dismal failure? Ok, it's never taken off in Japan (basically because Japanese consumers are highly protectionist), but it's generally been a surprising success. The original Xbox managed just over 24 million sales. That's a long way behind the PS2's 150+ million, but ahead of Nintendo's 22 million, despite Nintendo being an established brand at the time and essentially being able to sell in 3 major markets (US, EU, JP) rather than Microsoft's 2 (US, EU).
The Xbox 360 managed 83 million sales until the point where MS stopped reporting sales (the unit is actually still selling). By comparison, the PS3 managed 80 million and the Wii just over 100 million (though the Wii got most of those early in the cycle - both console and game sales dried up in the second half).
And this time around - despite the "disaster for MS" narrative, the Xbox One isn't doing too badly. Sales data is a little hard to compare at the moment, but it looks like the PS4 managed 20 million in a year on sale, the Xbox One 10 million in the same time and the Wii-U around 8 million over two years. The Xbox One is in second place, but set against previous generations, it has sold fast in its first year (remember that console sales tend to accelerate in their second and third years, as prices come down and more games become available).
So MS has a successful console brand on its hands. What it doesn't have is the kind of "single device living room dominator" that Ballmer hoped the Xbox One would be. The new management seems content to settle for "successful games console", though there's a real question as to whether MS will want to be in that space in the long term.
These bits from Engadget sum the most important elements up for me.
The negative:
"In practice, the resolution is sharp but the field of view is extremely limited. There's a rectangular area in the center of your vision that acts as your "window" into the reality HoloLens presents. It's this limitation that makes HoloLens not a VR headset, and also keeps it from being the Back to the Future 2 glasses we're all waiting for (I'm waiting for that, anyway). "
"The bigger issue for me was that the image was relatively transparent, which often made things look less than real."
The positive:
"Tracking -- which is to say, "how the headset interprets where your head is in relation to the world around you" -- felt the most fully-baked of any of the headset's sensors. Though the prototype was a bit finicky to move very quickly in, I had no issue turning around quickly or kneeling, or any other movements I tried."
( http://www.engadget.com/2015/0... )
It's not using simple stereo screens, they have lightfield projectors:
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/microsoft-nadella/
They track eye movement and adjust for that as well. I think you need the lightfield stuff so that the eye if forced to adapt focus for different distances, it's a depth cue that Oculus don't have.
It'll be interesting to see what frame rate and latency they achieve. It sounds like they have a lot of hardware in the headset, so it could be quite good. Plus they only need to render the bit right in the centre of the field of view at high quality.
That's not how "prior art" works. An idea is not patentable. A precise description of how to achieve an idea is patentable. William Gibson may have written some great stories about VR, but those stories are not descriptions of how to implement VR. I realize that many patents are terrible patents, and should either never have been granted or should be constricted, but I'm talking about the goal of patent law, not arguing about each individual patent.
Minority Report is another story / fantasy, with some CGI visuals to go along with it. Neither this nor "Virtual Light" describe anything in "immense detail". Immense detail would be source code, VHDL, wiring diagrams, etc.