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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."
What is slashdot now, just a gateway to wired?
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.
How much is Microsoft paying to astroturf these days?
This has to be one of the worst code names I've ever heard. Stop naming your things stupidly if you want people to use them. Hopefully the real name of the product would be better, but for now reading and writing articles about this will be ridiculous with a name like that.
Say what you want about old Microsoft, but they named things well. This probably would get named Microsoft Holographic Goggles. To the point, uninteresting, and clear. Sometimes I miss the days when tech products were not named silly things or made up words.
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.
How does this device handle a dull or dark holographic image projected in a bright environment?
Area51 - We are watching...
Granted this is just an interesting concept at the moment, however I think Microsoft may have something worthwhile here. The only thing is lacking (or missing rather) is a tactile interface - so that one could "feel" virtual objects.
I'll be paying attention to this, because I think this could be a game changer.
Regards,
MBC1977,
"Fastest-selling consumer gaming device of all time"? Bullshit.
Kinect, like everything else to do with Xbox, is a dismal failure. People bought it only when they had to, developers didn't support it, and the product was flaky. Now no-one cares.
Certainly looks a lot more interesting and viable than google glass. Once google pushed the wear it anywhere video camera recording what everyone is doing it became socially a dead product. Lets wait and see if MS can productize it without making the idiotic mistakes of google that led to the highly deserved coining of the word glasshole.
AR-Rift: Stereo camera rig and augmented reality showcase
What is Presence in Immersive Augmented Reality?
"In a previous post I presented the AR-Rift, a low-cost immersive video see-through AR head-mounted display based on the Oculus Rift DK1 and consumer cameras. Technology affording similar experiences will begin to emerge at a consumer level in the coming years."
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".
Each your fucking heart out Face(shit)book...
This is the first time I have been genuinely excited about any Microsoft product since Windows 7.
This is something I would definitely use.
I can imagine overlaying debugging screens above my computer monitors. Moving more work off my precious screen real estate without needing several new monitors. The potential for something like this is limitless. Provided it really works like we have been shown.
Android Software Engineer
No, it is still not holography. It has exactly nothing to do with holography.
is a nervous inventor, shifting from one red Converse All-Star to the other.
No wonder. I too would be nervously tip-toeing with my curve tippped Laplanders if I had pitched a new name for a common idea to a company employing actual engineers.
Having gotten the chance to play with the oculus dk2, the kinect, nintendo 3ds in the last year, I'm looking forward to seeing this all combined. Will MS be able to bring a good product to the market? Meh... it's the wrong question. The real questions I'm interested in are how will this push the tech forward? And, will it help push these technologies out into the minds of the consumers?
For a short while I was lucky enough to be asked to build some quick oculus demos to show people. (people who don't see high end 3d games every day are absolutely blown away) I would love to do the same with MS's new headset.
Kinect made Kinect seem like minor league.
You really need a use case for it for it to catch on. All the demos MS was showing were unnecessary sugar. There's no real use case that a monitor with a 3-D graphics card can't already do. People do 3-D modeling just fine on a computer.
And then you have the problem of being required to actually wear it. That already limits your market. No one is going to want to wear a headset all day, because fashion supersedes everything in life, so that makes things like Skype out of the question. Besides, Skype works just fine on your mobile phone.
This is going to go the way of the Kinect. Nice technology and concept, but very little use. And nothing necessary. Kinect has had many years of development behind it already, but really no new concepts for it.
I'd like to see something that shows you NEED this.
Microsoft has squeezed potent desktop hardware—or even a discrete GPU—into the head-mounted chassis
When they say this tech will melt your brain, they really mean it.
Dino
I don't buy it. I don't buy it. To project virtual objects into the real world required precise head tracking and real-time adjustment of virtual images. It also requires a very powerful video card. To project virtual objects and actually make them look solid takes even more power, both in terms of processing ability and brightness. The description of these glasses looks like it came straight from science fiction. I'll believe it when can see and test them myself and not a moment sooner.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
This is not holographic. This is augmented reality. I have seen many a prototype from others that actually function and are not just concept art.
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.
Microsoft is 0/3 in the console market with many billions of dollars wasted on the fourteen year long Xbox fiasco.
The first Xbox was an overpriced bunch of desktop PC parts thrown in a big ugly box and was dumped by Microsoft due to its failure in the marketplace.
The second Xbox:
* Was rushed out the door a year/year and a half early to try to pad out its installed base numbers
* Had the RRoD fiasco that inflated its installed base numbers by tens of millions of units
* Cost 200 dollars less than the much more powerful PS3
And despite all that Microsoft still came in last with the Xbox 360.
And now Microsoft is getting utterly crushed by the PS4 in worldwide sales.
To describe the Xbox as anything other than a monumental failure for Microsoft is delusional.
And, no, the Xbox One hasn't 'sold 10 million' - its worldwide installed base numbers are in the 7-8 million range. The Xbox One has been bombing so badly in sales that Microsoft will not admit to its actual installed base numbers.
Porn apps will determine whether it succeeds or not.
I see these being banned in the UK, along with Oculus Rift.
Anything that allows people to have sex with holographic children, or terrorist training = Huge NOPE from the UK.
> [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.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
I haven't understood whether the device is supposed to be connected to a computer (maybe via bluetooth) or if it can work alone. In the latter case, privacy issues are the very same as with google glass, and I don't see why public reaction should be any different: wearers will be called "holograssoles" instead of glassholes. Google glass had good reviews too, but they didn't save it from failure anyways.
If instead it's just a different I/O device to be connected to a computer wirelessly, then things might go different.
...Kipman, with shoulder-length hair and severely cropped bangs...
This is the central message here: this is a guy with shoulder-long hair. That is some impressive street-cred right there, but I'm worried that we hear nothing about whether he uses a tie and suit.
Hmm, am I being too sarcastic? It just gets up my nose when tech-news are presented in a cloud of inconsequential nattering. If this is worth hearing about, surely it can stand on its own merits.
Kinect is totally awesome with MMD. I think this personal holo-glasses will also be great, they just need to add a pantsu censorship filter...
If Microsoft gets into this business, they could diversify in anticipation of the post-software-centric world, just like Sony diversified for the post-electronics world by forming Sony Music and Movies. There is huge profit in entertainment.
In the movie, an actor puts on a special pair of glasses, and ends up going cross-eyed!!!
Can we try to avoid a headline similar to the following?
I'll pass
If they actually makes it work, i know few other uses for it then running Windows... :P
This needs an augmented reality see through attractive people's clothing app. You'd have to be able to define filters for your own idea of attractive people though.
But how well would it work for people with prescription eye glasses? Nobody in the demo is wearing eye-glasses - 60% of Americans have to wear glasses and only about 13% of Americans wear contacts. So that leaves over a hundred million Americans having to cram this thing over their glasses just to use it or not buy it at all. It seems that this suffers from the same issue that Google Glass had - prescription eye care. 3D movies are ruined for folks with glasses - try stuffing two sets of glasses on your head for a couple of hours - it flat out sucks. The selection of headphones is limited by how comfortable they are with glasses on for an hour or more. So why would this technology be any better?
The article focuses on how cool it is without addressing the actual practicality of having one - how heavy is it? How likely is it to survive five hundred or more impacts with the floor? What happens when the cat sit in it while it is lying on the desk? Besides a couple of gimmicky things, who cares? How is holography on the inside of my helmet better than a computer screen? I keep hearing about how much cooler it is, but not how much better it is than what I have now. Why is it better? A holographic display is not going to be any more enlightening than a regular display. Besides we already see the world in 3D. I really just don't get why this is anything but "cool" like 3D movies were in the 1970's, 1980's, 1990's, 2000's, etc. It's a gimmick.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
I know this.
lots of issues with current attempts and room to improve
You want to see 3D with something strapped to your face, Google Cardboard is the tool to compare this to, not Google Glass.
If you are comparing prices, well, maybe Glass is what to compare it to.
This is exactly how the Cylons came to be, with Holobands (see the short-lived Battle Star Galactica spin off series, Caprica). A holographic head band in which users can escape the real world to a virtual reality with their own avatar with the ability to interact with over avatars. My only concern here is will they have a stupid looking start menu? I think Google would be more of a success in such a product, if it can evolve the GG.
I am very lonely, the porn studios can create a sexual experience for me with this, add a fleshlight. Very cool, I have an Oculus and the porn is already great on it. Cheers!
Maybe it can be activated in GG way with command "OK, Microsoft"