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."

Comments

Re:Amazing

[dinfinity]

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 lightfield, it is holography (sorta)

[jcupitt65]

It's not using simple stereo screens, they have lightfield projectors:

Project HoloLens is built, fittingly enough, around a set of holographic lenses. Each lens has three layers of glassâ"in blue, green, and redâ"full of microthin corrugated grooves that diffract light. There are multiple cameras at the front and sides of the device that do everything from head tracking to video capture. And it can see far and wide: The field of view spans 120 degrees by 120 degrees, significantly bigger than that of the Kinect camera. A âoelight engineâ above the lenses projects light into the glasses, where it hits the grating and then volleys between the layers of glass millions of times. That process, along with input from the device's myriad sensors, tricks the eye into perceiving the image as existing in the world beyond the lenses.

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.