When you think of holograms today, your mind is probably flooded with visions of creepy electronic music artist revivals like Michael Jackson and Tupac or the digital pop princess Hatsune Miku. At Microsoft’s Windows 10 media briefing this week, Microsoft wants you to embrace a more productive holographic future with Windows Holographic.
While a lot of the tech industry is moving towards virtual reality, Microsoft is pushing towards an augmented reality. Augmented reality is not a new idea, but it seems Microsoft is serious about pushing AR from fun novelty to a serious work environment. In this conceptual holographic world, computers will no longer be limited to a screen or flat 2D plane, as the physical world in front of you becomes will become your new computing space.
At the event, Alex Kipman, the project’s lead, unveiled the HoloLens, a headset with a built-in system for holographic computing. The headset is not unlike VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, with a few key exceptions. Since AR seeks to interact with your physical surroundings, the HoloLens headset features see-through high definition holographic lenses to allow holograms to be projected in your line of vision. The headset also uses spatial sound to allow users to hear holograms according to location, such as holograms being displayed behind you (which begs the question: “What does a hologram even sound like?”). The headset is also equipped with various motion and environmental sensors for user interaction.
The HoloLens is a self-contained machine, meaning it has no wires and no requirements to be tethered to an external camera or computer. It has its own high-end CPU and GPU, and additionally a third processor dedicated to processing holographic information. The HPU works to process information from all of the headset’s sensors in real-time.
In an idealized concept video, the holographic computing platform showed applications in both productivity and entertainment. It showed a man visualizing his Minecraft world right in his living room, as if the virtual LEGOs has gained physicalit. There was a woman making Skype calls to a floating window of her contact following her as she walked through her office. In another interesting concept, a woman was fixing her sink while connected to another user who used his tablet to project helpful advice and information directly on the pipes in front of her. Imagine, using this thing for practical applications like plumbing advice!
Kipman followed this video up with a live demonstration of the actual hardware. They demoed a design suite called Holo Studio. Holo Studio allows the user to create holograms with a holographic interface and 3D print them. Think of it as a next generation MS Paint. Windows knows where you’re looking with the HoloLens, and can project a UI in the space directly in front of you. The user interacted with the software by using her finger to move and modify holographic objects displayed in front of her, while also using voice commands to quickly access more options and tools.
In these demos, holographic computing proved to be a very personal experience, as the holograms were only visible to the wearer of the HoloLens. A specialized camera set-up was required to show the audience exactly what the HoloLens user was seeing.
Wired has a great piece describing their hands-on experience at a super secret meeting with Microsoft all the way back in October. Back then, the project was codenamed “Project Baraboo,” and was already five years into development.
Microsoft plans to get HoloLens development hardware to developers by Spring of this year. They say that HoloLens will be in consumer hands “within the Windows 10 timeframe,” though considering how hard Microsoft is pushing the longevity of Windows 10, it could be quite some time before you’ll see this thing on store shelves.
Windows Holographic and the HoloLens certainly does sound and look like a glamorous future of computing, but so many people also had hopes of living their Minority Report interface dreams with Microsoft’s Kinect a few years ago. Kinect didn’t exactly live up to the hype, but maybe we’re at a point in technology that HoloLens could really bring about some cool changes to the way we work with computers.
By Alfredo Dizon, eParisExtra