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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."
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.
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,
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."
Yeah, like "Wii"
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".
It pushed depth cameras into non high-end robotics. The Kinect tech wasn't new, it was cheap. Tons of robots now use Kinects to see.
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.
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.
So a 3D monitor will let a tutor remotely draw on the pipes you are looking at, or the electrical junction you are looking at?
No. It will *never* interact with reality. You are hung up on the motorcycle example, and not looking at the others.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
The numbers of devices sold are not the only thing that you should look at in how successful a device is.
If Gamespot is to be believed, they lost about $126 per device. That will only be offset if those people sign up for gold membership or pay for something else on the side.
The win for Microsoft in these cases, is probably about getting into the living room in the first place. In this case, it doesn't lose influence in vital areas of the everyday users life.
Android Software Engineer
"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.
I agree, PS2 owned the market, the Cube the first to go and Xbox expected to call it quits soon as they just weren't selling. Then Halo came out and everything changed.
I've never owned a Xbox but have played Halo (~2001) (Quake2 but with better graphics). I had a PC Voodoo 3Dfx graphics card (~1997), it came with a version of Quake 2 made for that graphics card, it's hard to say now which had the better graphics, the 3Dfx or Halo.
Citation?
Every xbox 360 sales package contained an xbox 360. Further, every xbox package contained an xbox 360 controller. Not every xbox sales package contained a kinect.
People buy kinects at a maximum ratio of 1 kinect per xbox. Not everyone wants a kinect.
People buy xbox 360 controllers at a maximum ratio of 4 controllers per xbox. In addition, xbox 360 controllers are more likely to break and be repurchased than kinects or xboxes.
There is some minor academic and hobbyist use for kinects outside gaming. However, there is also minor academic and hobbyist use of controllers and xboxes. This will roughly even out.
Ergo, xbox 360s and xbox controllers *must* have sold faster then kinects.
At bare minimum, the order of "fastest selling consumer gaming device of all time" must go
1. xbox 360 controller
2. xbox 360
3. kinect
We haven't even begun to discuss how the wii consistently outsold the xbox and came with both a wiimote and a nunchuck, and we know that this must be true.
You don't need a citation, use your brain.
"Fastest-selling consumer gaming device of all time"? Bullshit.
Fastest-selling does not mean best-selling.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Fastest selling != most sold.
Your points, while correct, aren't particularly relevant. 1000 Kinects sold in a month is 'faster selling' than a 10,000 XBoxes sold in a year.
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.
What you say is technically correct for a very narrow span of time, but also one of the most pernicious myths about the finances of the gaming industry.
The article you link is from when the 360 first went on sale in 2005. The 360 remained MS's "main" console until late 2013. Production costs fall wildly over that time. Indeed, in the traditional MS/Sony model of selling consoles, you sell at a loss for about the first 12-18 months, then as unit cost reductions and economies of scale start to work in your favour, you keep the console selling at a more or less neutral level for the rest of its life-span, reducing the retail price as costs fall further.
Where do they make the money from? Xbox Live subscriptions, first party games etc are a small part of it, but only a small part. Most of the money - and it is a lot of money - comes from third party game fees.
See, when you buy a console game as "new" (rather than pre-owned), a large chunk of the sale price goes directly to Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo. On a full-priced game, this tends to be in the $10-15 range. Historically, this has explained the price differential between console and PC games - though with Valve now taking a similar cut of most PC game sales, who knows how long that will last.
The platform owner has spent next to nothing on those third party games; in most cases, it only gets involved at the certification stage. So it is, for the most part, "free money". And with series like Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden etc racking up the sales they do, it is a lot of free money.
So the trick is attracting third parties to the console. To do this, you need to have either a large current installed base, or the promise of a large installed base to come. This is why console manufacturers are happy to sell at a loss for the first year and often to take a loss (or at least a risk) on funding first party or platform-exclusive third party games - the Halos, Gears of War, Killzones and Gran Turismos of the world. Those are the bait to lure in the early adopters to get the installed base growing to get the third party developers on board.
The other business model is the one that was previously (but not currently) used by Nintendo. In the SNES, N64, Gamecube and Wii generations, as well as with its handhelds up to and including the DS, Nintendo sold platforms at a profit from day 1 and focussed much more on first party games development. This actually worked pretty well for a long time; they made megabucks on the SNES (which also had a lot of third party support, so win-win there) and even when the Gamecube ended up with poor sales, they were still able to turn a profit on it.
But around 5 years ago, this model started to break. The Wii was essentially dead by 2010; console sales were slowing to a trickle (after a few phenomenal years) and despite the huge installed base, most Wii owners (a different demographic to that on other platforms) did not buy many games, so third party developers abandoned it. Then came the 3DS launch.
The 3DS is doing ok now. Well in Japan, so-so in the US and Europe. It's on course to be a kind of PSP-level success, which is ok (the PSP actually did much better than is generally realised, largely on the strength of Japan). But the 3DS's launch was actually a bit of a disaster. For months after launch, the damned thing just wouldn't sell - and price was a big part of it. So Nintendo reversed historic policy and slashed the price; for the first time in its history, selling console hardware at a loss. It didn't remain at a loss for long; only 6 months or so until it got onto a neutral footing - but it was enough to bury Nintendo's historic strategy. Console sales improved, third parties moved in (particularly Japanese developers, many of who shy away from the high cost of developing for home consoles) and Nintendo's losses (the first in the company's history) were reduced. When the Wii-U was launched, it was launched with a traditional Sony/MS style pricing strategy; sold at a loss at first, before moving to
Wow, bitter much...
Kinda guessing you're not a fan of the Xbox. Possibly even that you're a bit of a fan of one of its rivals? Remember that blind brand loyalty (or blind hatred of a brand) is self-defeating on the part of the consumer.
Microsoft does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Sony does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Nintendo does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Valve does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
The fanboy-arguments between the various sides in the console war are more bitter this time around than I've ever seen them before. Which is ironic, really, given that the actual practical differences between the PS4 and Xbox One are vanishingly small and only really apparent to hardcore enthusiasts.
That whooshing sound you hear is the irony rushing right over your head...
> [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$, not engineer.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
...Kipman, with shoulder-length hair and severely cropped bangs...
This is the central message here: this is a guy with shoulder-long hair. That is some impressive street-cred right there, but I'm worried that we hear nothing about whether he uses a tie and suit.
Hmm, am I being too sarcastic? It just gets up my nose when tech-news are presented in a cloud of inconsequential nattering. If this is worth hearing about, surely it can stand on its own merits.
The fastest selling gaming device of all time is most definitely not the xbox and why is M$ lying because of course the fastest selling gaming device of all time is not theirs. Just because it also does other things does not mean it is no longer a gaming device. So the smart phone is number one, just because the Losephone (a lot funnier than calling it a Winphone) is one of the worst sellers. The biggest reason why the smart phone wins, is their are a lot more choices than there are for game consoles. Of course these kind of glasses really will have their greatest impact when plugged into a smart phone and not when plugged into a game console. Then on the fly wireless lan gaming potential will most definitely be one of the high lights if they get it to work well and is physiologically comfortable with regard to extended use.
Why does M$ always seem to head off in the wrong direction, game consoles no, absolutely not, smart phones yes, the only logical direction for the device. Especially as the smart phone can so readily hook into more high powered hardware and act as the link between that and the glasses. Can they turn the Losephone into a Winphone, that would depend upon how far beyond gaming they can extend the use of the glasses. Of course they will not be on their own, ultimately, 3D glasses of what ever description are the most effective way to significantly extend the usability of smart phones. Stick a bunch of rfid tags on your fingernails so that the glasses can track the relative orientation of your fingers and you are done, apart from of course coming up with a range of usability gestures, like thumbs up.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I'm sitting here in london with a DK1 and a DK2 on the desk next to me, and no policemen have showed up yet..
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
They were talking about Kinect - not the Xbox. And "fastest selling entertainment device" is a flexible term - as you can define whatever period you want to base your judgement on.
Going off this it seems to have managed 8 million sales in 2 months. That's certainly got to be a contender for "fastest selling over 2 months". The PS2, Wii and PS4 all might have been able to manage faster, as might some of Apple's portable devices, if they hadn't been constrained by supply shortages.
Of course, Kinect sales flatlined after the first few months, nobody's disputing that. But there is certainly a defined period over which it seems to be "fastest selling".
And in what the hell sense is the Xbox brand a dismal failure?
Has Microsoft's entertainment division turned a lifetime profit yet?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Has Google's Android division turned a lifetime profit yet?
Has Google's Apps division turned a lifetime profit yet?
Has Google's Anything but search and advertising business turned a lifetime profit yet?
Has Apple TV's division turned a lifetime profit yet?
Has Samsung's Galaxy Gear division turned a lifetime profit yet?
These are all equally interesting questions that I never see raised here. Only as it pertains to Microsoft.
The bulkiness and usage examples in the article made me believe this is something you don't wear out of your home.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
These are all equally interesting questions that I never see raised here. Only as it pertains to Microsoft.
That raises the question, are those equally interesting questions? The answer: Nope. zzzzz
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The first use for technology like this, especially if it can't be taken out of the home, is always porn. Guys are going to wear Hologlass to make their wives look like Beyoncé.
Think of the scene in the matrix where operators are guiding ships in and out of Zion. There is a huge 3D interface for them to interact with.
You could eventually get right of ALL external displays. All of them. No longer would you need a tv in every room, or at all. The TV could be as big or as small as you want, any where you want.
You would no longer have to produce any external interfaces at all. Everything would be virtual, seamlessly integrated into your current environment, anywhere you are.
Imagine playing a shooting game where the enemy is seamlessly integrated into your house.
The possible applications for AR are truly astounding.
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.
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.
Japanese consumers expect their games to be in JAPANESE. That's the problem. A lot of Japanese know perfectly broken English. FWIW it did reasonably well in Japan for a non-Japanese device.
In the early days of the 360, MS spent a lot of time and money love-bombing Japanese developers to get them to make games primarily for the Japanese market (though many of them got exported to the West). Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey - the two best Japanese RPGs of the first few years of the last generation - were funded by MS, developed in Japan with Japanese as the primary language and English translations provided later. So language was no issue for those. Similarly, MS pumped a lot of money into Cave, making sure that the 360 got ports of a lot of their most notable arcade machines.
All of which did next to nothing. I'm tempted to say MS did absolutely everything it reasonably could to break into Japan. It still didn't work. I wasn't surprised therefore that they've barely even bothered to try this time around with the Xbox One. The Japanese home console market is in a bad way anyway, so it probably doesn't matter anything like as much as it did a decade ago.
Nintendo managed to get into the causal gaming niche by selling cheap consoles with poorer hardware specs but making up for it with their own games specifically written for that hardware. If you want third party games a lot of them will be ports or cross-platform games and having worse hardware means your port will likely look like shit. The SNES was a bit of a fluke because the hardware specs were better than most of the competition at the time.
Today people have smartphones and soon a lot will have smart TVs with Android as well so this strategy simply does not work anymore.
I think you're exaggerating. Sony loses money while they are ramping up a new console. They also lost money with the Playstation 3 until they did two hardware shrinks. But they did not have consecutive losses for the past 5-6 years on their gaming division.
That was certainly true for the Wii and Wii-U, but I'm not sure it holds up for Nintendo's other consoles. The Gamecube hardware was, by all accounts, good. Better than the PS2's and not far short of the Xbox's. It's still slightly amazing that the PS2 did as well as it did, given it was both underpowered and a complete dog to develop for.
The N64 was more complicated; most of its hardware was pretty decent, but the decision to stick with cartridges rather than move to a CD format for games doomed it in the race with the Playstation. That was probably the most significant point in console-history (I'd rank it above even the Atari-crash, which was strictly a US phenomenon) - the moment Nintendo decided, on the basis of piracy fears, to part way with almost all of its significant third party developers (and also to massively annoy Sony, who had done a load of development work in partnership with Nintendo on CD-based console technology). If the N64 had used CDs, chances are the industry would look completely different today.
lots of issues with current attempts and room to improve
You're thinking of The Jerk
it was the jerk and the opti-grab
Think of many situations where mock-up training is needed (for example, working in radiation fields). If you could practice a task in a safe environment before actually doing it, you could safe hundreds of person-hours of exposure.
These are impressive, and I hope they continue to develop them.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
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.
Hate to break it to you but Halo was an XBox release title.
Yes, and it's release made the Xbox relevant for the first time. I wouldn't be far off saying it saved the Xbox. Dependent upon how much money MS was willing to lose before dropping it; it's place in history listed along with the Dreamcast, and the Cube.
What will Jay-Z make his wife look like?
"War makes me sad." - Me
And in what the hell sense is the Xbox brand a dismal failure?
These are all published numbers. Google them yourself.
XBox development costs: 24 billion
RROD writedown: 1.1 billion
Xbox division losses as at 2007: 5 billion
OK, so by 2007 the Xbox brand was worth negative 30 billion dollars. Earnings since then:
2008: +426 million (first profit for Xbox in a calendar year! yay!)
2009: +169 million
2010 +165 million
2011: +210 million
2012: -229 million (ruh-roh, Raggy)
So for Xbox 360's prime earning years, it made 741 million dollars. That doesn't even pay back the 1.1 billion writedown on the RROD fiasco. Let alone the 30 billion dollars Xbox was already in the red.
Negative thirty billion plus zero point seven four one billion equals TRAINWRECK BLACK-HOLE DISASTER.
Microsoft tries to deflect attention from overall Xbox performance by either mixing its numbers up in the greater Home and Entertainment reports, by emphasising "revenue" or "units shipped" or "market share", or by fixating on a small time period - that's how you get shit descriptors like "Microsoft's usually profitable games unit". Yeah, usual in the sense that the unit made annual profits for four straight years. It just cost Microsoft's shareholders thirty billion dollars in the years before that.
OK, how about some more recent numbers:
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Summary: Xbox costs Microsoft two billion dollars a year.
Yep, that's right, Microsoft spent thirty billion dollars setting up a business unit that runs at a loss of two billion dollars a year.
By any sensible reckoning Xbox is arguably the greatest disaster in the history of the tech industry. Microsoft's just good at covering it up.
As with every other rapper, Kim Kardashian.
That sounds like the book Ready Player One but without having to wear a thing over your head....I'm ready to play FPS like that right now. That's been my dream since I was child
You can *absolutely* be thrown out of a hotel for using running water, and I guarantee -- outright guarantee -- that some people will use this in hotels and not be kicked out. I'd say being obnoxious about running water is *way more likley* for you to get booted from a restaurant or hotel (and a hefty fine at that) than being an asshole with one of these.
You don't need a tablet, but people buy tablets.
What if I sell two copies of Custers Revenge to my friend within a picosecond of each other? Is that relevant?
Fastest selling always means "units sold/relevant lifetime" unless you're trying to be dishonest about how successful a product was, which is exactly what microsoft is doing here.
Maybe it can be activated in GG way with command "OK, Microsoft"