Build 2015: Holographic Academy

Last, but not least, the way of interaction is, in my opinion, one of the most powerful of all. Like the other two, the extreme simplicity of its implementation seems false, but only 1 line of code could tie a text to the execution of command of an object. In my case I defined the following two texts:

• "I Love Holograms" that executed a command to reset the virtual world to start from scratch.
• "Drop Sphere" that ran a previously defined command DropSphere on the sphere that had selected with the view.

In a room with soft music, about 80 people among participants and tutors, the voice recognition system did not fail even once and that was even with my English... well, I do not exactly have a native accent. I need to say, unlike the rest of the gestures, speech recognition had a small lag of a few seconds between when you say the command and HoloLens execute the associated action. Another point to be polished a little more for the final version.

When talking about Hololens, people always reference the ability to display holograms in the real world. But what about sound? Well, believe me, it is at least as spectacular as the graphics capabilities of HoloLens.

The Hololens has two small red speakers, they do not clog the ears at any time and stick to the top of your ear, it seems to do a vibration effect on the cartilage that transmits sound perfectly. If you take the Hololens off and get close to the headphones then you hardly hear anything, put them on again, and reproduce the sound perfect if you are in the proper position. I say proper position because the environmental sound can be defined from a focal point in Unity or emitted by an object. In either case the sound (its volume and its perceived position) varies depending on our position. To try this, we did a little game of hiding and seek in Unity, something like the Marco Polo game, an object plays a song at its position, then it is randomly positioned around us and we had to find it just with the sound. Once you have found it, its position is varied again randomly. Really amazing how well it worked.

So far, all seems awesome. But when the spheres of the notebook demo fell to the ground, they disappeared without colliding with real objects. To fix that, we only need to add an object from the Hololens Kit to our scene in Unity. This object allowed us to draw the mesh of the real world as a wireframe, opaque, or hide it. Once placed, all objects automatically collided with the real world. In addition, the mesh was not static, it is constantly redrawn so you can throw an object in one direction and place an obstacle, for example a chair on its way, and the virtual object collided with the chair. It was really impressive, you can start thinking about a hundred games mixing holograms and reality.

3 hours were enough to do 7 very simple demos, reviewing all aspects of Hololens: gestures, head tracking, voice, collisions, and sound. What surprised me most was the ease of developing using all this technology. Many things like collisions with the real world ™, positional sound, creating a scene, and making it visible. Hololens gave them to you automagically™.

The Hololens team decided to map Unity measurement units 1:1 with the real world, with 1 unit being 1 meter in the real world, so it was very intuitive to create and position objects in the real world.

The organization of Microsoft. We were called to a hotel about 5 minutes from the Moscone Center, on the 5th floor. We were asked to leave all electronics, including our Band, in a locker. They put us in line by couples and we were getting into a room and presented to our mentor, with whom we shared the subsequent hours. He ate with us and took care of everything we needed. All this between big security guards, I saw 3 in the living room and another 2 in the elevators. Each time we finished one example, an achievement was awarded to us and every one people applauded, "gaming", friendly and personal. A great way of making us feel very comfortable and enjoy the experience.

I am not saying bad, not from a fanboy, because I do not think anything could be considered "bad". The development experience needs to be polished a little to avoid the necessity to stop apps manually to deploy a new one and to allow debugging our code.

They need to reduce the latency a little in the voice commands, if possible. Now it has the same latency as Cortana has, so it is not itself a show stopper, just that all other gestures are so immediate, that the delay in voice is noticeable. Instead I expected instantaneous results.

Viewport size. Seek a monitor 24" and sit about 40 cm in front of it, that would be more or less the space Hololens is rendering. Perhaps it is a hardware constraint, perhaps performance. The truth is, I don't know since we were told it is something they are working on. If you approach an object then this somewhat spoils the experience of even a cut of virtual objects in a real-world object.

The attachment to the head is still a bit weak and gives the impression that if you turn your head or lean too much, you can drop the Hololens. It would be a nice improvement because we often tend to lean to look behind an object and you must refrain from doing that for fear of making the HoloLens falling.

The future is amazing. I know because from the minute I put the Hololens on, I knew I was in it. The Hololens is something new and surprising, the professional applications in medicine, mechanics, sports, or leisure are so easy to see, that I personally believe it will revolutionize the world. Now we can only hope that Microsoft decides they want our money and create an early adopters program so developers can get to work with them.

Here you have some photos of a Hololens exposed that they had in the showcase and let us photograph with, selfies included showing that yes, I was there and that this was not just a dream of science fiction, although it seems so!