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

this is awesome

[Noah Haders]

wearable glasses are dead, long live wearable glasses! srsly though, MS approach makes sense. GG never made sense. projecting data onto your visor for real-time augmented reality? that's cool.

Amazing

[Etherwalk]

The team they have working on this is excellent, the idea is promising, the reviews are great, and the advertising is good. Looks like a solid win. If they have good patents on it, they should be able to control a large and growing market 5-10 years out.

Q. How does one subtract light?

[Macfox]

How does this device handle a dull or dark holographic image projected in a bright environment?

William Gibson and others have prior art.

[tlambert]

If they have good patents on it, they should be able to control a large and growing market 5-10 years out.

William Gibson and others have prior art. Not sure if you watched "Minority Report", or if you have read Gibson's "Virtual Light", but both describe this sort of thing in immense detail. It's basically a straight forward interposition strategy with slightly smaller hardware than has typically been used in the past.

The real issue that's going to come up is idiots wearing these things while driving, and so on, which is actually not as idiotic as it sounds, but will definitely be illegal as hell for no reason involving reported accident rates. Sort of the same thing that happened with Google Glass 1.0, when people didn't undertand that it couldn't film 24x7 because they didn't understand the concept of "connectivity" nor the concept of "battery life".

Re:William Gibson and others have prior art.

[Richard_at_work]

Is there anything more than a flashy website behind that?

Re:William Gibson and others have prior art.

[Richard_at_work]

As pumped air flotation systems were in use in the 19th century, I'd suggest it wasn't the Disney cartoon which killed the patent...

Holograms?

[Arkh89]

No, it is still not holography. It has exactly nothing to do with holography.

inventor ?!?!??!?!

[citizenr]

> [inventor Alex] Kipman ... idea he first pitched to Microsoft, which became Kinect

so he invented Kinect? hmm nope, that would be Primesense cleverly going around earlier patents on structure light (for example Viewpoint Corps US6549288 filled in 1999) by using random instead of striped dot pattern.

maybe Kipman invented original Natal aka Kinect 2 aka time of flight depth camera? hmmm nope, that would be 2 or 3 whole companies M$ bought (3DV, Canesta) spending over 1 Billion dollars before settling on ready to sell Primesense camera in the end.

What exactly did he invent? He is a manager at M$, not engineer.