Mixed reality; mixed emotions?
Although the advent of virtual reality (VR) was received with apprehension and concerns, it paved way to the onset of augmented reality (AR), leaving one to think — what could be next?
How does communicating and interacting with life-sized, interactive, real-time, 3D holograms sound?
Just to give you a better understanding, I’m talking about something close to the technology that Mr. Stark uses in the movie Iron Man as shown below.
Another example would be the Princess Leia projection in the movie Star Wars.
Imagine talking to the hologram of a far-away beloved right inside your room, who can see what you are doing and can interact with you! Doesn’t the sound of creating designs, visualising them in 3D in real-time and making live changes sound amazing?!
I’ve got to say that this is some super impressive technology and it leads us to the discussion of mixed reality (MR). Allow me to explain how this differs from VR and AR.
In VR, there is a completely virtual environment that is simulated by the computer and a user wearing a special VR headset, gets immersed into it. Some advanced VR also allow freedom of movement. The image below is an example.
In AR, all seeing and interacting is very-much in the real-world, with digital content added to it. Some space in the real world is occupied by virtual objects (I don’t mean this in the physical sense of space, but just to give you an idea). You don’t necessarily need an AR headset for this, although some do exist. Today, AR apps can be downloaded in smartphones giving easy access to this technology. The Snapchat filters and apps like Pokemon Go are some examples.
“Mixed” reality typically implies a mixture of VR and AR and this can be interpreted in two ways — MR from the virtual world and MR from the real world.
The former technology renders a digitally simulated environment that fully replaces the real world, blocking it out. Although this sounds exactly like VR, the difference is that here, the digital objects overlap real ones whereas in VR, the virtual and real environments are completely unrelated. Say you are an interior designer and there’s a house you need to design. This kind of MR technology allows you to overlay a virtual space with your designs on the real house, with provisions to make live changes, draw inspiration from other designs, have team meetings and so on. Check out this video that demonstrates the amazing capabilities of this technology (too good to be true) as created by Microsoft.
The latter doesn’t just overlay real objects with virtual ones but also allows users to interact with these virtual objects. In order to facilitate interactions, often these objects are projections of humans who are not phyiscally present in the surroundings of the user. This takes us to the hologram of Princess Leia from Star Wars. Just imagine the same scene but with all the characters wearing a fancy headset created by Micrsoft which goes by the name “HoloLens”.
If you’ve ever wished that teleportation existed, then Microsoft has invented probably the closest — holoportation!
This is a technology that allows Hololens users to engage in a conversation with people who aren’t physically present in the same room. Their digital 3D renderings are visible to those in the conversation and allows them to talk, listen and interact with each other. This advanced technology projects the live digital renderings in real-time on to the retina of the eye through the special Hololens headset thus giving the illusion of the others’ presence.
Baffled yet?! Let me give you an easy understanding of what is going on here.
Anyone interesting in engaging in the act of holoportation, needs to adorn this piece of headgear.
This physical device contains multiple sensors that come into play during holoportation (I am loving this word!). The HoloLens has a pair of translucent screens which ensures that you are not completely blocked off from the real world while allowing the hologram projections to appear in your line of sight. There are a number of depth-sensing cameras facing out front, perched on the top part of the device which capture as much data as possible. This information is then turned into a digital model onto which the 3D renderings are projected. The lens also contains an accelerometer (to measure how fast you are moving), a gyroscope (for measuring orientation and tilt of your head) and a magnetometer (that acts as a magnetic compass). The information gathered by all these sensors are vital in deciding how to display the holograms to you. All this data collected could amount to terabytes and the kind of computational power required to process this much data live and in real-time sounds unimaginable! Microsoft introduced a HPU (Holographic Processing Unit) chip inside the device that translates the huge data into smaller chunks manageable by the HoloLens GPU or CPU.
The HoloLens also has a microphone for taking voice commands and speakers that fool you into hearing things in 3D space. For example, if the hologram of the person you are talking to is standing behind you, then his/her voice seems to be coming from behind. This is known as binaural sound.
Take a look at this video to witness the magic of holoportation!
As amazing as they sound, in the simplest terms, holoportation and holograms are after all just illusions. However, the convincibility of such technologies is indeed commendable and to some extent, spooky! This is definitely one step up the ladder that takes us to an advanced tech-driven world (if it already isn’t one!). Gradually, these HoloLens headsets will reduce to minimilistic forms (maybe even to lens that one can wear on their eyes) thus blurring the lines between reality and virtuality.
Everything is hunky-dory as long as you make sure that you don’t lose your grip on reality! :P
