HoloLens Hands-on: Microsoft Leapfrogs Apple in Innovation

[Mark Spoonauer]

After experiencing a series of mind-bending HoloLens demos, it's clear that Microsoft has the most ambitious vision yet for computing's future.

HoloLens Hands-on: Microsoft Leapfrogs Apple in Innovation : Read more

 

[Merry_Blind]

Wow I was skeptical at first but this is very impressive! Can't believe Microsoft actually created something revolutionary that seems to work for once! Can't wait to see the bright future of this device!

 

[NightLight]

this is massive

 

[eklipz330]

i'm excited where holographics and VR will be in 15 years!

 

[Giroro]

This concept completely and irrevocably lost me at voice control. Microsoft (and a the rest of the industry) has been working on that for, what, 15 years without getting it to work consistently?
Also, anything relating to the exploration of Mars is basically fiction. There is several minutes of delay between sending a command and the transmission arriving at that planet that can never be fixed. And even then, all you can get back from current rovers are relatively low res still images. . . and a lot of scientific data best viewed in a text editor.

 

[waltfrench]

<i>“I couldn’t help but think that Microsoft had just overtaken Apple in terms of imagining the future of technology.”</i>

I'm not sure Apple ever had the crown. Where they have excelled—and where Microsoft has been lagging—is in bringing real products that real people will buy and enjoy.

HoloLens, which is demo ware in a field that MANY OTHERS (Google Glass, Jaunt, Occulus, …) have been toiling, *IS* a nice extension of their Kinect efforts to add more virtuality. Disruptive of the incumbents? Not at all.

Maybe the most telling is that I have yet to see any of them dismiss HoloLens as immature, or saying “Microsoft just doesn't get it.” They're simply not threatened but instead have work to do to build the field.

 

[Afion]

I work for a major European car manufacturer and we recently opened our first factories in China. Because the Chinese technicians have not yet all the technical knowledge needed to solve all the breakdowns in the factory, we have put a system in place where they have head mounted camera's sending real-time video to a technician or engineer in Europe and they then give auditory support to the person.

This system does not work as well as expected because of the language barriers being worse than what we thought. Having the possibility to give visual input like explained in the article would be a major improvement.

I can definitely see a lot of different uses for a system like this in a factory environment.

 

[burningdragons]

Ok guys just letting you know this technology is real and will be coming relatively soon. BUT it will not look like the images shown. To calculate the polygons in VR scenes like the minecraft or space one you would need a lot of processing power. However things like the video chat (without the tablet guy bs) or the stage demo would be capable on current hardware (if you had the wallet). Just don't get TO hyped for this technology thinking hololens is going to give you the holodeck from Star Trek. Also this http://www.wired.com/2015/01/magic-leaps-vision-for-virtual-reality/

 

[falchard]

Apple is not an Innovative company. They are a marketing and hype generator for redesigning existing innovations. Microsoft is one of those companies that does innovate which Apple redesigns from. For instance the Tablet PC and... a windows based computer.
This seems ... cool. VR is nice, but this is like an overlay on reality. Won't need a GPS for my car now.

 

[matt Storm]

In regards to the google voice for cell service I'm able to make calls on my nvidea shield tablet of att which it came with however i tested it on my droid razor and it came in fine for phone calls

 

[rokit]

Just because someone said "i saw it and its awsome" doesn't mean anything because thats how marketing works.

"The protoype HoloLens I tested consisted of a headset attached to a chunky box that you wear around your neck that houses the CPU, GPU and HPU (holographic processing unit)"
What kind of box there must be to make their trailer show a reailty?
Again people don't be fooled, sure minecraft stuff is possible but scanning motocycle and being able to model it is bullshit right there. Just look at the devices that are used in the industry, their size, time they took to capture everything and time to ploish the fro final presentation.

And the part with Apple innovating is kind of strange, could list any innovation done by Apple? They were always a marketing company, they sell the same stuff you can bye from others or gather parts yourself. The only reason you might think they were the reason some tech existed because of them is that you don't follow other companies. Apple simply takes the newest technology that is too pricy for mass production and slaps apple logo on it while naming it differently.

 

[Guest]

It allows the device to process terrabytes of data from the glasses' sensors in real time.

How is this possible? Am I supposed to believe that this thing can process data an order of magnitude faster than L1 cache? The theoretical bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 = 32GB/s. So this thing has a pipeline that's at least 32 times faster than PCIe 3.0 *16 lanes?

Come on!

 

[Joshua Lance]

Ready Player One? WELL I know this one is ready.