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Microsoft Announces Windows Holographic Platform
An anonymous reader writes: At its Build 2015 developer conference [Wednesday], Microsoft announced the Windows Holographic Platform. In short, the company will let developers turn Windows 10 apps into holograms for HoloLens. On stage, Microsoft showed a Windows video app that you can simply control with your voice: Just say "follow me" and the video app moves along as you walk around a room. "Every single universal Windows app has these capabilities," said Alex Kipman, technical fellow for the operating system group at Microsoft. Apps can look like little windows, or they can be more than that. The demo included a photos app, a browser, Skype, a holographic Start Menu, and even a dog on the floor.
Isn't that a clever use of resources!
When you're done playing, kindly place it next to the Kinect, will ya?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I know this.
I wish the press and Microsoft would stop using the word "Hologram" when describing this. It's Virtual Reality. There are no holograms involved whatsoever.
and even a dog on the floor
"Happiness is a warm puppy." Even Charlie Brown and Lucy knew this. An image of a dog is far from the real thing. Hopefully, virtual "reality" will never replace the real thing - though with the number of people living their lives on facebook and twitter, maybe it will help drop the birthrate well below zero when the only sex most people get is cyber.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Wired magazine covered it a month ago. Yep, Microsoft's new CEO is trying new things and attempting to restructure the company to be more accepting to these far-out-there ideas. Kudos. The old mantra was to only focus on core enterprise software and the Windows OS. I think the holograph idea is interesting, no doubt, but media is spinning it into "Look Microsoft bought Minecraft and they are working on a holograph system. ITS FOR GAMING!!11". No, the article I read spun it into a more mundane but useful application. Remote training / services etc. Examples were a plumber who can see your pipes and can show you in 3d what goes where... Or call up your buddy and he can help you fix your engine because he can see in 3d what you are seeing, and vice versa. This isn't VR. Its not exploring mars from the rover's perspective. Its sharing a perspective. That- is interesting.
Virtual anime girlfriends* are finally here!
* Don't worry, I'll store them in separate folders so they don't know about each other.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
What do the people on the other end see? You wearing a giant contraption? Or is Microsoft going to virtualize your face to make it appear "normal"?
I'll go right down in the basement and haul up my holographic projector, I'm sure the wife won't mind if I borrow the kids' sleep chamber cryo unit to fire up the display. After all, how can they mind since they're all holograms? Ha, ha! Clever people we are these days.
Yes, I've been wondering when they were going to get around to building the operating system for that machine all of us ran out and bought in 1974 or whenever. I knew it was a good investment. Everybody said, "no, dude, don't buy the holographic projector, there's no O.S. for that, yet." But I just punched them in the god damned groins and ran away laughing because I'm a genius.
I'll have to dig it out of my giant mountain of 3D glasses and virtual reality headsets and body hoists, but that will give me an opportunity to sort them all by decade. Maybe they will make an operating system for the VR things or 3D glasses next, who knows, it's Microsoft -- whose motto is, "If It's Further Away From the Command Line Then It's The Future, We Will Guarantee You That Much."
Hopefully this return to common sense and keeping our high-tech up to date with actually running software signals that very soon Microsoft will publish the first operating system that runs entirely on teledildonics. Then we can call customer support and ask them why they're fucking us so bad!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The demo starts at 2:31:00 into the keynote video:
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2015/KEY01
I'm a 2000 man.
I remember their demo of it on stage with making that little drone.
That drone took far longer to make than it should have.
If she had a mouse and keyboard, but still using those glasses to see it in 3D, she'd have been done in less than half the time.
Visual gestures DO NOT WORK. They are slow and imprecise. They will ALWAYS be slow and imprecise. No amount of technology will make them better.
No, a body suit doesn't count because that is a body suit, not a visual gesture.
Although what I would give for a full body suit with sensation capability. Skype time just became more fun.
Even the tech in the much-referenced Minority Report was NOT visual gestures, for crying out loud, he was clearly wearing LIT hand devices when interacting with the screen.
Universal Health Care has nothing to do with communism. In many countries that have universal healthcare the hospitals, clinics, and other companies supplying treatments, medical devices, etc. are still privately owned. The only difference is that the government holds a monopsony position that can keep prices more favorable for its citizens. Some even allow for otherwise free-market systems for additional or non-essential care.
Many non-communist countries have employee or member owned businesses as well. You can bank at a credit union or buy insurance from a cooperative if you want. Just because you have a system that permits private ownership of industry does not mean that all industry must be privately owned.
I think that most people have realized that while pure communism or socialism sounds great on paper, it doesn't actually work in the real world. Much like many other ideologies, it requires humans to behave in a way that humans don't behave so it's impossible to reach the described outcomes. Rather than try to address and fix these, proponents would seemingly rather rail against capitalism like the poster above.
... the most popular I/O devices for PCs will still be keyboard, mouse/touchpad, and monitor. Sorry, I'm not wearing a HUD all day. No chance. What we have a now is more comfortable than any possible holograms. Why moving my head, my arms, my legs, when I can interact with the computer just with my hands?
We need to accept the idea that sometimes mankind reaches the top in a particular field, and you just cannot improve from it. Have we changed the 2K year old Latin alphabet? Not really, just a couple of letters, it's just ok as it has always been. Actually, sometimes things could get worse. Let's talk about architecture. I think Italian Renaissance buildings are just the best looking ever. Modern buildings are more energy-efficient, but they'll never look as good as those.
So the point is: just improve what people are asking to improve. I/O devices are ok as they are. Did you see what happened to google glass...? That's what happens when you want to force IT revolutions that nobody is asking for.
The videos imply fully opaque augmented reality on a translucent screen. Why are they lying? Why is the product not available? It makes me skeptical they have anything of value.
Except for the fact that this has nothing to do with holography. Either our friends at MS have yet to learn anything about holography, or else they are lying through their teeth.
It's useless to argue. Most americans have been brainwashed by trashy TV shows since they were kids. Even cartoons (e.g., Superman, Batman) carried anti-communist messages, at least in the past.
If you told them that the richest country in the western world is basically a government-driven economy (I'm talking about Norway, where the State controls the 5 biggest companies and 50% of the GDP through the government budget), they just wouldn't believe it and would start singing the US anthem like idiot monkeys. In the meantime, Norway's citizens enjoy standards of life, salaries and healthcare that most americans can only dream of.
Let them get obese, alcoholic, and watch the katrashians on TV. That's what they deserve.
We've been building buildings for thousands of years without visualization technology. The Engineers are trained how to build physical models of the structures they are planning on building. What problem does this solve? I see this more as a visualization tool for people who are not engineers, that would like a view of a job site, I.e. Middle to upper management. If that is the audience, it would be wiser to market it directly to them. If you are selling engineering software, talk up how you can import/export projects from Cad, how to perform on the fly measurements of the 3d space ect.
That is all.
This time a much cooler version
From how the technology is described, it sounds like they might actually be doing light-field reconstruction, which is what holography is all about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holography
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/microsoft-nadella/
About as useful as those talking coca cola machines in the 80s..
-db
I can't think of a reason that I would want an app to follow me around, but I bet that Big Brother can :-(
Let them get obese, alcoholic, and watch the katrashians on TV. That's what they deserve.
Isn't that a little harsh? I mean I cringed when the tortured Picard, but they did eventually release Bajor back to its rightful owners.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Time for next over-hyped technology.
All I can think of is an irritating holographic paperclip..stalking me.
Reality catches up. I had a nightmare once, where Microsoft Clippy and Bob were following me around.
Invent Holoemitters.
Animal Farm was propaganda designed to make you think exactly that. Why do you think it was deemed a "classic" and required reading for the smart kids? I'll tell you why, so they could all think alike and line up when more kool-aid was offered.
Only I can judge you.
Even Marx himself predicted that a necessary period of transition from Capitalism to Communism would be the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat". We can all debate the niceties of Marxism, but the fact was that its formulator and primary theorist believed that the people would need to be "shepherded" to the Utopian Marxist society.
The real problem for Communism is that the industrialized countries never bit. There were a few abortive revolutions in the mid-19th century, but the leadership of these countries were smart enough to recognize that political liberalization was the antidote to a restive working class. Most countries saw enfranchisement of larger numbers of people, increasing influence of legislative assemblies, and a more populist approach to government.
That's why the only countries that actually grasped on to Communism were primarily agrarian states like Russia, China and Cuba. In pure Marxist theory, agrarian states have not developed to the point where they are ready for the Communist revolution. That's why you have offshoots like Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Stalinism and the like, all offshoots required to explain why economies dominated by agrarian workers should skip the whole mercantilism/capitalism stage and go straight to Communism.
My personal feeling is that Communism, like other Utopian socio-political and economic ideologies like the various strains of Anarchism and Libertarianism, are impossible to implement. Anyone attempting to will have to make so many compromises that the ideology itself becomes compromised.
That's not to say Marxism doesn't have its uses. Certainly Marx's insistence on history being seen through the lens of economics was critical to the transition of that entire branch of academia from political narratives to a more comprehensive view of the functioning and interactions of historical societies and events. But as a socio-economic and political model, it's a flop. It can't be implemented without dictatorship, and as we've seen so many times, once the dictators gain the power to effect the Communist transformation, they are so corrupted by that power that they actively kill the revolution themselves.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
modded +1 WTF?
Animal Farm was propaganda designed to make you think exactly that. Why do you think it was deemed a "classic" and required reading for the smart kids? I'll tell you why, so they could all think alike and line up when more kool-aid was offered.
There is nothing more adorable than naivety wearing cynicism's clothing.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's the other way around.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Subject says it all.