Microsoft decided to take a calculated risk and leave the Virtual Reality market to Facebook (through Oculus and Samsung) and HTC with their dedicated headsets Gear VR, Rift and Vive. Their focus is on Augmented Reality, or simply put – “Mixed Reality”. The term MR is expected to replace AR quite soon, and Microsoft’s latest video demonstrates they clearly don’t want to be associated with AR as well.
The video shows the vision of how can productivity be increased by introducing the collaboration/co-location effect between different users on separate locations. All future users of HoloLens should need is a collaborative suite (perhaps Microsoft’s own HoloOffice?). We certainly hope this won’t remain on being a video alone, but there are some practical challenges the industry will have to overcome, especially in the field of latency and data-transfer.
One such solution might be the ‘pixelization’ of real-world people, which would dramatically reduce the need for bandwidth. Naturally, all the FX used in this video belongs to ‘Hollywood magic’, as the HoloLens does not have sufficient compute power to drive these experiences. Still, the future is on the way… as the company puts it:
“Microsoft HoloLens is the first fully untethered, holographic computer, enabling you to interact with high‑definition holograms in your world.”
