11 ms·
Microsoft demos 'holoportation' 3D presence tech with HoloLens
- hanniabu 11y agoI was waiting for this, knew it was only a matter of time before Microsoft came out with something like this since it's right in their field of office products. Hopefully this is the catalyst needed to create better work/life balance and lower the barrier for remote work and make it just as productive as being present in the office.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dominotw 11y agoFor remote work, what are the advantages of this over a good video conferencing/screen sharing type of setup.
- hanniabu 11y agoIt's really hard to say exactly what it is, just as I can't tell you exactly why being physically next to somebody is better than a video conference, but it is. This would bring us one step closer to being physically present without actually being so just as video brought us one step closer than we were with just phone calls.
- JabavuAdams 11y agoField of view and peripheral vision?
- regularfry 11y agoBetter visibility of non-verbal interaction cues. Also, not sharing screen real-estate between the person you're talking to and the work you're collaborating on.
- jader201 11y agoBut only if they manage to drastically reduce/eliminate the latency that's present with video conferencing. It gets us one step closer by allowing virtual eye contact, but if the latency is still there, it will still be subpar to in-person interactions. The other thing that wasn't so evident by this video is that everyone you were taking to would have to be wearing Hololenses, so it will still be a bit awkward. Not trying to be a downer, just that as a remote worker, I think about all of these things that make remote interactions hard.
- sinxoveretothex 11y ago> The other thing that wasn't so evident by this video is that everyone you were taking to would have to be wearing Hololenses, so it will still be a bit awkward. I remember seeing the guy who invented the selfie stick present it to Canada's Dragon's Den: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7YbcoCkbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7YbcoCkbs. My reaction was: this is ridiculous and stupid. Nobody will ever use that let alone buy it. Let's just say I was slightly wrong. Not only that, but people go crazy over VR. This will take off, I'm sure. https://quikpod.com/quik-pod-selfie-stick-cbc-dragons-den-2015-update/ https://quikpod.com/quik-pod-selfie-stick-cbc-dragons-den-20...
- guelo 11y agoYou're sure it will take off. But at the same time you confess that you are very bad at predicting these kind of things. So, not sure what you're saying.
- randiantech 11y agoI know it may sound trivial, but I work from home almost every day using short pants and no shoes. What I want to say is that home is still home, my kids will appear and yield, my tv might be turned on, and the dog would eventually bark. By no means I would want to transform my home in an office, I work from home for lot of things that wont be allowed in an office ever. And thats fine, I guess.
- maroonblazer 11y agoI work for MSFT but don't work on HoloLens. Not all remote work is created equal. There are certain kinds of work that require richer kinds of interaction. E.g. whiteboarding, prioritizing with Post-It notes, brainstorming. Anyone who tries to "dial in" to one of these meetings is perpetually behind those in the room given they can't see what's on the wall/whiteboard. I could imagine technology like this making that kind of remote work much more productive.
- beams_of_light 11y agoWe already have the technology needed to be much better at remote meetings, but people don't use it.
- leoedin 11y agoWhat technology do you have in mind? I've suffered through far too many awful Google Hangout meetings - if anything can improve remote meetings then I'd love to hear about it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- deckar01 11y agoI don't understand why they need to pretend to support features they haven't developed. It makes something that is obviously advanced feel cheaper and fake in some way. The daughter is obviously a recording, but they call it "live", say she can't hear him, then he gives her audio queues. Who is editing this and what are they thinking?
- elisee 11y agoHe says "you can only hear me but you can't see me" (since she isn't wearing a hololens). I think it is actually happening live between him and her.
- sigmar 11y agoPretty cool, but my first thought is: how authentic will communication be when "holoporting" to each other if you both have those big hololens mounted on your head? It will be hard to pick up on each other's facial expressions and impossible to look into each other's eyes.
- x5n1 11y agoHololens will eventually be a contact lens. Progress is progress.
- deelowe 11y agoMight as well say that this will eventually be transporter or holodeck. The best we can assume at this point is that they'll reduce this down to something like a pair of large sunglasses, but even that's a bit optimistic without some revolutionary changes in optics.
- bloaf 11y agoWe'll just replace our eyeballs.
- TheLogothete 11y agoWe'll just replace our heads.
- erikpukinskis 11y agoSure, eventually, but I can't imagine that on any reasonable timeframe.
- cududa 11y agoIn a generation or two they'll do facial tracking. I imagine you'll get a full 3D model made of you, and it'll pick up the facial movements and transpose them onto your avatar
- 11y ago
- LarryMade2 11y agoNice "demo"... Microsoft lately seems to be really good at being a "proof of concept developer." Which is cool and all that, but then people wait and forget why it was so cool. As a comparison, Apple holds back their tech till it is polished and ready for market, so people are excited and start literally lining up to get whatever it is... And when they get it for the most part they aren’t disappointed, because it is pretty much exactly what was presented on stage at the show and they can show it off while its still a new shiny idea.
- overgryphon 11y agoThis is a demo from Microsoft Research, which does research into new areas, not a product group.
- cldellow 11y agoThis is a point worth repeating. Does Apple even publish its research? I've benefitted from many papers published by Microsoft and Google's research departments, either directly through learning something I can apply myself, or indirectly through processes that end up in open source technology. Does Apple even publish research? Some Googling failed to turn up anything. In fact, I found an HBR paper that said Apple specifically does not publish its research. IMO, this makes Apple much less praiseworthy than Microsoft/Google/Facebook.
- kuma4 11y agoSteve Jobs abandoned Apple Advanced Technology Group. Apple isn't interested int technology researches.
- tudorw 11y agooff topic, but anyone know if there wifi mesh software went any further than this ? http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/994abd5f-53d1-4dba-a9d8-8ba1dcccead7/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/994abd5f-53d1-...
- Mafana0 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Qworg 11y agoHere's the actual page on the research - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/holoportation/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/holoportation/ Compare this to previous work at Microsoft, just last year: http://techxplore.com/news/2015-07-microsoft-hololens-video-creation.html http://techxplore.com/news/2015-07-microsoft-hololens-video-...
- blaze33 11y agoIf you look at the tv that's in the room, it looks like it's actually showing the real live 3d reconstruction with what I'd guess is a 500-1000ms latency. So the main video that is in sync (when the guy has it's own holograph in superposition) was certainly edited afterwards..
- eganist 11y agoSo, an idea: How much work would it take to segregate just the augmented reality displays as a pair of glasses that a user can wear while receiving the display data wirelessly? I say this because once you can do that, you can have (for instance) an executive conference room setup with a number of identical conference rooms scattered around the world, each with a server performing the hololens rendering logic and rendering across _n_ glasses per room. No bulky hololens computers-on-head and an eerily realistic recreation of one conference room with all participants in-room. I don't know the exact patents Microsoft filed on the display technology they have for the visors, but I suspect it's not yet easy enough to compress them into anything close to Google Glass yet (you'd need larger glass in any case), but one can hope.
- bnj 11y agoOnce we get there anyone will be free to re-enact Kingsman at will
- mpnordland 11y agoI realize that I'll probably never get something like this, but dang, that was cool.There seemed to be a distinct quality difference in the realtime created models, and the prerecorded models. The realtime ones had issues, where as the prerecorded ones (like the girl with the dog) were smooth and nice. I definitely think that if this goes mainstream, higher quality models will be generated in most cases and only use real time stuff if there isn't one available.
- blisse 11y agoHonestly, given how rapidly technology is advancing, I think that it's not unreasonable to expect a consumer-friendly version of this within 10-20 years. It's happening!
- ChicagoDave 11y agoFive years.
- azinman2 11y agoSo amazing. Can't wait until all you need is a few tiny webcams and something like magic leap allows it to be in your glasses so you can actually see the other person unobstructed.
- imron 11y agoShrinking it all and putting it on the coffee table was a nice trick.
- CM30 11y agoHey, this looks pretty impressive. It also makes me want to imagine some of the video game uses of the technology, like say, how cool a Five Nights at Freddy's game would be based on this tech... To some degree, it also reminds me a bit of a certain villain from Teen Titans...
- kazagistar 11y agoI see they learned from their previous campaigns, where they focused on the ability to "work from anywhere" and were criticized[1] for creating a strange, dystopian vision of all work and no leisure. Now, they are focusing much more on the personal aspects in their marketing, even though their primary market is fairly likely to be business. [1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3683-microsofts-dystopian-pitch-for-remote-work https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3683-microsofts-dystopian-pit...
- fuddle 11y agoThats very impressive, looking forward to seeing this advance in the next few years.
- DanAndersen 11y agoThis is pretty exciting because of its potential for telementoring. I've been working on a research project using tablets and augmented reality for surgical telementoring in austere environments ( https://engineering.purdue.edu/starproj/ https://engineering.purdue.edu/starproj/ ), but a setup like what MS has here would offer so many benefits. Imagine a trainee surgeon being able to feel as if a mentor surgeon was actually present and able to gesture and give instruction during the course of a live surgery, for example.
- veritas3241 11y agoHe seemed extremely careful not to let his daughter walk through him. He always made room for her. I wonder if there have been studies done to assess how creepy it might be to have a family member walk right through you...
- blisse 11y agoI think it was more of a gut reaction of "here's something moving towards me, let me get out of its way", rather than being extremely careful. I don't think we're at all ready for having things passing through us.
- cb18 11y agoHow do they define which aspects of the captured image to extract, model, and transmit? If they were just modeling the humans, I could seeing using motion detection, or infrared perhaps, but they seem to have also extracted and modeled the little girl's toys. So i'm curious what method they use to extract just specific bits of the image captured in the holodeck. Perhaps this is answered in one of their papers. If anyone knows and has a quick overview, or link to a relevant paper that'd be great.
- miguelrochefort 11y agoThe setups are identical, so it seems obvious that they capture everything that differs (i.e., not part of the floor and cubes).
- mcpherrinm 11y agoThe easiest thing is probably to "calibrate" the scene with nobody in it, since the cameras appear to be fixed.
- stuart78 11y agoRemarkably impressive, but I have to admin to being a bit creeped out by the save and relive stuff at the end. A bit too close to the dream machine in "Until the End of the World" for my taste.
- hoodoof 11y agoMicrosoft seems to be fiddling around in research while Sony runs away with the Virtual Reality cup.
- AndrewKemendo 11y agoAs a point of clarification, this is Augmented Reality, which is actually quite different than Virtual Reality in practice and scale. So it's an apples to bananas comparison.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hoodoof 11y agoThe biggest difference at this stage seems to be people handing over money for VR while AR, well...... In a very real way they are "the same" in that Microsoft and Sony have each chosen to bet on AR or VR, not both. The are the same in that they are both "immersive headset technology interfaces". Looks very much like a betamax versus VHS battle and AR at this stage is a distant betamax.
- scrollaway 11y agoYeah... no. The VR industry is in a bubble right now. This is actually something that was talked about at GDC. A massive portion of the VR industry is betting on video games, and there's several good economical reasons why we think the high-end VR products (PSVR, Oculus, etc) will vastly undersell. Sony is the one who's likely to suffer most, in fact, as the tie to their console limits their market even further.
- renox 11y agoThe Vive has one camera on the headset, so it can do a kind of AR too..
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
- gajomi 11y agoIt's expensive, which makes me want to think of who would buy these first. There might be a market in medicine (think Vilayanur Ramachandran style phantom limb therapy) and psychiatry.
- Heliosmaster 11y agoThis is not cool just for work. I can definitely see myself using it to feel closer to my family, a few thousands miles away. Also, this is research. Too many of these comments are bashing it, mostly because it comes from MS I guess. We can still hate their products, but the research is really useful.
- Heliosmaster 11y agoThis is not cool just for work. I can definitely see to feel closer to my family, a few thousands miles away. Also, this is research. Too many of these comments are bashing it, mostly because it comes from MS I guess. We can still hate their products, but the research is really useful.
- vic_nyc 11y agoThe first and only promising technology from Microsoft I've ever seen :)
- dang 11y agoUrl changed from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/268997/Microsoft_demos_holoportation_3D_presence_tech_with_HoloLens.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/268997/Microsoft_demos_ho....
- kordless 11y agoThese things will be the end of all of us.
- greenspot 11y ago1st thought: next Skype 2nd thought: 4 cameras and some space required 3rd thought: command-w
- maxpert 11y agoMicrosoft just made PORN more convenient!
- breezest 11y agoThe concept is great but the equipment must be very expensive. It seems multi-national company may make money by providing a private room to enjoy the 'holoportation service'.
- foota 11y agoThis team must have the best remote standups.
- freekh 11y agoPretty cool demo! Maybe they got inspired by what this guy did a while back with 3 kinects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghgbycqb92c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghgbycqb92c?
- kodablah 11y agoInstall this at sports stadiums and not only make my own viewing more "embedded" in the action, but allow replay to get any angle (granted lower res than they are used to for really tight calls). I imagine that many sports organizations would be lining up outside MS research's door with cash in hand. Though the tech probably needs to advance quite a bit more to capture that many 3D objects in real time.
- jonny1090231 11y agoVery impressed! I can't even begin the possibilities that this tech could bring to the table.
- ksec 11y agoGive them another 4 years time to perfect their technology, that is 2020, another 5 years again to iterate and adoption. I can see in 10 years time this will have massive impact to office work. Less Business trip to travel. I dont think it will replace business travel. But there will be a lot less of it. And it is also dependent on the countries broadband quality. ( May be in the future the Job requirement will write you need 100Mbps broadband + low latency results. )
- hiharryhere 11y agovery very cool. The guy in the video is an excellent presenter too.
- lipanski 11y agoIs it just me or HoloLens sounds a bit like a Hooli product? All jokes aside, given that the rendering quality improves, this could have interesting applications for scientists researching facial and body expressions in certain environments. It would enable them to replay scenes and emotions which current 2D/3D video fails to capture, especially because it allows you to change your viewpoint. I doubt this will be a game changer for teleconferencing, mainly due to the oversized device you have to wear, but then again all these gadgets tend to look a bit creepy in their initial phases (e.g. the Google Glass prototype).
- r3bl 11y agoNASA already uses Hololens to get the scientists to feel like they're walking on Mars. Rovers basically capture the footage from Mars in all perspectives, these pictures get transferred back to Earth, and scientists are able to "walk" on Mars with as low delay as possible (of course, it takes a while to transfer the images down to Earth). It's a remarkable thing and I really do feel like Hololens (or some other Augmented Reality project) will have a huge impact on the scientific community. I did an interview with a software developer from NASA about this project: https://opensource.com/life/16/1/scale14x-interview-parker-abercrombie-nasa https://opensource.com/life/16/1/scale14x-interview-parker-a...
- noobie 11y agoDownvote me if you want but HOLY FUCK! I got goosebumps when he started replaying the interaction in reverse! This is really reaaaally cool!
- supergetting 11y agoIt was really cool! the replay with him and his daughter reminded me of a scene in the Minority Report, but much cooler!
- neals 11y agoI never hear or see anybody mention this, but I feel that it is important to note that the actual surface area of the HoloLens is currently way to small to give anything resembling the presented experiences. They always show the hololens used from a third perspective. Filmed with a camera, not the actual Hololens capture. The hololens that I got to use (admittedly, almost a year ago now) was just nowhere near the expierence of any of the demo's. It's just a tiny tiny augmented display, compared to the massiveness of the headset. Let's say it's more toward Google Glass than towards Oculus rift. I really believe in this (type of) product, I have clients in certain fields where augmentation is just a obvious next step, but it is not going to be what they currently display. And they know it, because there isn't a single image on the internet where you see what the Hololens user is actually seeing. Though I'm sure I'll be proven wrong at that in the comments below. [Edit] Yes, I see there is a small render of the Hololens in the bottomleft corner, but you really need to see it compared to your full field-of-vision to get how small it is.
- dosshell 11y agoAs far as i know only dev-kits are out and the Hololens is not consumer ready. The screen size is something they need to fix before then, i totally agree, but that problem is of a "beta hardware" type of problem and something time can easily solve - I believe.
- SolarNet 11y agoThey are actually pretty close to the FoV limit that the display technology they are using can provide. Magic Leap is going to have the same problem unless they have found a new technology since their original hints. Also long term use will probably burn your retinas out, they are likely running those lasers at the barely safe limits for brief exposure.
- Natanael_L 11y agoNo lasers in use, just fancy optics
- cududa 11y agoDon't know who told you that but that's not true at all. I've used test hardware that was the same display and had a full FOV (just needed to be connected to external power and GPU)
- murbard2 11y agoThe case against supersonic plane travel..
- rosme 11y agoJust this week I wrote a blog about how to build your own holographic studio by using multiple Kinects and RoomAlive Toolkit. Nowhere near the sophisticated capture that Microsoft Research demoed of course. http://smeenk.com/build-your-own-holographic-studio/ http://smeenk.com/build-your-own-holographic-studio/
- davkap92 11y agoMicrosoft Office 3D here we come, walking past life size graphs and real life spreadsheets
- iamleppert 11y agoI can't even, the video "demo" has been so obviously post-produced.
- happi-live 11y agoIt's very cool!