In a mind-blowing revelation, I learned my university had a Hololens to try. Before trying it, I'd always believed that AR would be the future. After trying it, I believe that AR will be the future - the tech isn't quite there yet.
The finger clicks work like 60% of the time, and the windows seem to vary in opaqueness which really threw me off. (And yes, the FOV is pretty terrible right now). But for minutes at a time, I'd be fully immersed.
Mixed reality will be one of the biggest transformations, I think. The digital world used to be restrained to our desks. Right now, we carry it around with us in our pockets (and maybe even on our wrists). But with augmented reality, it's going to be joined with our real world - the two are finally going to truly merge. It's impossible to know what will develop from this.
Unlike VR, AR is going to be a lot easier for people to jump into. VR is disorienting and isolating and I can't imagine, like, my mom spending hours inside it.
But AR is a lot more straightforward. Put the headset on and hey, there's new things floating around in your vision. Simple as that. You're not locked away into another world. VR could be a great gaming and movie platform, but for day-to-day life AR seems so much more useful.
Anecdotal evidence, but I recently had my grandmother stay with me. She loved the HTC Vive I had set up and had no disorientation in the virtual worlds.
Looking at these developer headsets, it looks like they're moving closer to VR and further from AR. With the camera inputs I'm guessing they're aiming to simply use the camera feed and overlay things on top of that - it'd solve the opacity issues with the current overlays. I'm guessing we'll be gravitating more towards a virtual world with real objects overlayed in it rather than a real world with virtual objects.
All I really need is something where I can look at people and it reminds me what their name is, and maybe a little blurb about them that I've written previously ("met at party jan 2017. Making RPG about wolves").
It's amazing for sales of heavy/bulky products. We're selling rather simple apps that just visualize a product on a nicely produced marker to manufacturers of all sorts. Workflow for their sales teams is pretty much...take marker to customer or event, use iPad or another tablet to show it. Sometimes we add simple interactions like tapping on things to change colors and the like.
We keep raising the price and still haven't reached the point where sales get hard.
This is pretty much the simplest possible AR (one object via marker and handheld device). Decent AR glasses are quite good in warehouses etc...basically think heads up display. Mixed reality seems to be focused on meetings/conversations in all the samples but I'm sure there's other interesting applications. We've experimented with tracking buildings and so on and I can see adding stats and info to real world objects.
The tech isn't quite there yet (FOV), interaction will remain a big barrier for quite some time (imo). There will also be some interesting ethical questions that need to be asked once we really "get there" and the objects get so real that they are hard/impossible to distinguish. Think about facial recognition+overlays of different faces etc.
The view part is only one half of AR. The second is that it provides a 3D surface of the users field of view.
Industrial uses and helpdesking are obvious.
1. Less need for physical interfaces on machinery
2. Need help in, say, fixing the elevator? AR allows the helper in other end see what you see and point out things and direcr movement in persons field of view
3. Building maintenance. To point out the location of work, just let the AR device guide you there
Imagine what you can do with heads-up displays on any daily situation.
Easy to imagine how people would use one meeting other people in a party (must be some fashionable glasses), buying groceries, or merely receiving notifications doing whatever.
Hard to imagine how it would be useful within known people, or in leisure activities (except for AR games).
At work one would need to look at it case by case. I doubt there's any general tool.
That matches my experience as well. Don't think I've ever been so excited by the potential and at the same time so disappointed by the reality of a technology as I was by the Hololens.
I'm quite impressed with the Hololens, but keep in mind that it's a totally a first gen developer product, so was better than my expectations. Yes the field of view is a tad narrow, and yes, the gestures still don't pick up at much at they should. But the holograms look stellar, the position tracking is quite stellar, objects that are placed, stay placed very well while you move about, the effect works very well. The floating planets that my kids stuck on the living room ceiling, continue to stay floating there until somebody later comes by and moves or resizes them. I think this device will have a bright future.
I agree about the future, and when I step back and put my engineering hat on I also realize how impressive what they actually have pulled off is. It's just that after hearing about this amazing Hololens for a year and then finally getting to try one my expectations where really high, and I have to admit the reality fell far short of what I was hoping for.
The next hololens release isn't until 2019. The current device shows a lot of potential - but you're right, the fov (and the resolution) need to massively increase. Additionally, the headset is a bit clunky and cumbersome. Hopefully, the next iteration will be lighter as well.
The finger clicks work like 60% of the time, and the windows seem to vary in opaqueness which really threw me off.
This tells me that Microsoft still doesn't quite have the corporate culture for the level of innovation they are aiming at. They should have abandoned opaqueness in favor of a really wide FOV, and stuck with a reticle system or some other more robust for pointing and selection.
Are you sure that the reduced FOV is an artifact of opaque rendering?
That's putting words in my mouth. I'm talking about what the company should have been prioritizing. If there's a physical clicker, then they should have left out the highly unreliable hand gestures. The fact that they didn't shows they don't quite have the corporate culture and/or management insight to do this kind of innovation.
When creating a new category of this kind, you don't put things in too early and turn mainstream customers off. That would have been like introducing the iPhone with a much smaller screen than it had, and with a wonky multitouch.
We seem to have converged on a consensus that people will more quickly gravitate towards AR than VR. I don't understand how that came to pass. All of the AR experiences that I have seen -- including the examples in the article -- are potentially interesting, but far less compelling than what we have seen so far in VR.
Yes, the promise of true AR is great. But so far I have seen no example of an AR application that does a wonderful job semantically understanding the world around you and correspondingly attaching things into your view. Every experience I've seen for the Hololens so far does a great job with tracking, but there is no true interaction with the physical world -- the applications are simply aware of some general constraints on what the surfaces of the room look like.
In VR, on the other hand, a demo like Zuckerberg's I think convincingly showed just how powerful a VR experience can be and how seamlessly elements from the real world can be integrated into it.
I honestly am curious as to why people are so readily seeing much greater potential in AR. Perhaps in the VERY long term, but for a good long while I can only see VR applications dominating the market.
"All of the AR experiences that I have seen ...are ... far less compelling than what we have seen so far in VR."
The point of AR is not to offer compelling experiences, it's point is to expedite real world industrial and service processes and planning.
Don't think of how cool it's supposed to look. Think how much it saves when the maintenance crew can navigate a new building as easily as in a video game. The selling point is not to have some cool experiences. The selling point is to have for the repair crew a navigation track to the maintenance item, and a red arrow pointing to it.
I agree. I think it's become a glib bit of wisdom that ignores the many restrictions and challenges that AR faces.
Even when we have good subtractive rendering and a decent FOV - there are still massive constraints on the type of environment you need to have. AR reduces to VR with enough restrictions on room geometry.
Also - I want to be elsewhere - not in my house or office with extra things added in.
Personally I see VR dominating the entertainment and home market and AR dominating the industrial market. Just being able to look at a part in an aircraft engine, ask for the blueprints and specs for that part, flip through them for the info you need and get back to work all without having to move from where you are or even use your hands will be a game changer.
If AR worked a bit better than it currently does I could easily come up with 5 or 6 real practical (and quite dull) applications that would make life a lot easier for people here at work. I cannot say the same about VR.
This is very interesting, the current price of VR hardware is too high for the average consumer (based on research from EEDAR). $299 is a move further towards mass adoption for PC based VR - excellent!
Recently tried a HoloLens, after reading some articles and seen the marketing videos I thought it was going to be as immersive as Vive or Rift.
But that tiny window ruined it completely for me. It just isn't immersive at all. Sure it is functional and cool, but I don't honestly think that it's going to be all that useful until the field of view is much larger. Another thing that annoyed me was that I couldn't get close to the holograms. You had to stand at least 1-2 meters away. Maybe it was incorrect settings or something, but kind of disappointing when MS had led me to believe it would be as immersive as VR.
Get the latest Windows Insider Preview (or wait for the official Creator Update; it's probably very close, the "preview" watermark is gone in Insider, so the current build looks like a release candidate).
Once you have it set up, look for "Mixed Reality Portal" in the Start menu. It will guide you through the setup, starting with a check that you have compatible hardware.
For a developer kit, I guess you follow the links to sign up at
Don't spend too much time on Windows holographic, as it won't become the defacto standard in AR
Create some pass-through mobile games/experiences with Vuforia or Kudan. Hand-held AR isn't that compelling IMO, but many of the lessons you learn from it will be applicable for headset AR
Agree (handheld AR with Unity, won't need killer hardware either just you cell phone+your PC is fine). But be aware that if you ever want to ship something Vuforia is kind of costly. For quick prototyping Unity+Vuforia is pretty great. ARToolkit is decent but the tracking isn't as good (imo) and there's more hands on with extracting features from the markers yourself etc. Eagerly awaiting v6 which has been "coming soon" for quite some time now.
You can also search for OpenCV tutorials, iirc there's a Unity plugin.
If anyone has recommendations for a more open stack I'm listening (own a Unity license but think it's meh-ish for AR). Most certainly would like to migrate from Vuforia since I don't want to bet on something that could just go Mataio and be gone (+licensing cost is pretty prohibitive but acceptable for my use case).
The Vuforia video shows a concept headset from ODG and BMW.
Right now there aren't any cheaper AR headsets (worth buying), but there will be later this year. (and now a plug for my own startup: https://www.miralabs.io/)
There's a bit more information on our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/MiraLabs.io/), but we're purposefully not sharing much at this time. What I can tell you is it's a consumer-targeted mass market augmented reality headset for under $100. Apps for the platform are built using Unity.
It’s also going to be stepping up its efforts with mixed reality on Windows 10 on PCs, which is a core feature of the forthcoming Creators Update for Microsoft’s desktop OS.
So another update that will fail to install on my force-upgraded laptop from 2009, but will still try every day, no matter what, whenever it feels like it?
Anybody in the market for a laptop shaped brick for cheap?
The terminology is a mess (cue laughter from the audience as Abrash tries to float "Augmented Virtual Reality" [1]). I would say:
- Augmented Reality: you have a see-through display which lets you see the real world with virtual objects added to it.
- Mixed Reality: you have an opaque display which shows a model of the real world, updated in real time using cameras, with virtual objects added to it.
NASA's Use of HoloLens Puts St. Louis Scientist on Mars with Curiosity Rover
If anyone sees Raymond E. Arvidson, PhD, walking the halls of Washington University wearing Microsoft HoloLens, then he's not entirely walking on Earth. HoloLens combined with OnSight, a software tool developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in collaboration with Microsoft, allows Arvidson to be absorbed in the Martian landscape conducting 'field' research. Arvidson may actually be walking on university flooring, but the software is allowing him to virtually walk on Mars with NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. In his role as Curiosity Surface Properties Scientist, Arvidson is planning Curiosity's next move.
Marketing material and PR stuff...a lot (IKEA catalogue, Lego boxes). I know it's used in warehousing (routes to locations of stuff, basically HUD of sorts) and it's used a lot for product demos/sales (think demoing some machine at a convention).
I've seen this company (http://www.specdev.com) demoing AR visualizations for wind farm development here in the Netherlands. I've also seen another company (which I don't recall the name) demonstrating a hololens app for maintaining wind turbines.
Does anyone else get a Fahrenheit 451 vibe from mixed reality? No doubt it is completely awesome and I'm very excited. I can't help but feel like we'll all end up like Millie Montag.
The finger clicks work like 60% of the time, and the windows seem to vary in opaqueness which really threw me off. (And yes, the FOV is pretty terrible right now). But for minutes at a time, I'd be fully immersed.
Mixed reality will be one of the biggest transformations, I think. The digital world used to be restrained to our desks. Right now, we carry it around with us in our pockets (and maybe even on our wrists). But with augmented reality, it's going to be joined with our real world - the two are finally going to truly merge. It's impossible to know what will develop from this.
We live in interesting times.