Fool me, this is real good shit ! [the VR thread]

[Darkflame]

pogo - -sigh- Literally Hundreds of people have used Hololen's at Microsoft Build last month. Please go Google. Watch some videos, read some write ups. Its not smoke and mirrors, they have working Hololens (again, hundreds) in the model you see them wearing on their heads.

[pogo]

And the reports were very different from what was shown at E3. In particular the version people were able to try had a very narrow field of view. So having Minecraft fill whole of a widescreen view? Not possible, at least not with the Hololens MS have let people try. Unless they’ve solved that problem in the few weeks since then what you see in the video above, captured by a large and complex camera rig, is very different from what the user sees through the head-mounted version. Smoke and mirrors.

http://recode.net/2015/06/15/the-risky- ... raft-game/

edit: I should add there’s a simple way to convince me I’m wrong – or to convince you that there’s still a lot of work to do. Release it. Make it available to developers/early adopters even in limited numbers. After all it’s one of the main platforms for Windows 10, alongside PCs, phones, tablets and the Xbox One, and Windows 10 comes out next month. It leaves a big hole in MS’s strategy not having it available in some form, especially as it’s the most radically different of the platforms so the one developers need the most time with to adapt their software for or to write new apps for.

[gumboot]

Despite whatever I've read so far I'm really not clear on what the viewing angle of hololens is.

What somebody would call a narrow field of view when it's strapped to their face is probably much larger than what they would call a narrow field of view when they drew it on a monitor... I don't trust anybody's judgement, here, unless they're actually standing (for example) 6-8 feet from a 60" TV and saying that yes, indeed, the hololens goes up to the all edges of that TV at once and no further.

[pogo]

It’s been the most consistent complaint from those who’ve used it, though they report it in different ways. Here’s Ars:

Everything about the HoloLens experience is nailed. Except for one thing. The field of view was narrow. Very narrow. In both the horizontal and the vertical directions. You have this glorious 3D augmented reality experience... but only with your eyes looking straight ahead.

More worrying perhaps for MS it doesn’t seem to be just a problem of display size. They don’t just need to put larger or higher resolution displays in there, as Oculus have done to improve the Rift. It seems to be a consequence of the way the optics work, which might not be fixable with the current design.

[gumboot]

It’s been the most consistent complaint from those who’ve used it, though they report it in different ways.

I can't dispute that a complaint is a complaint... but I do wonder how realistic people are being when they say "small".

Not saying they're wrong. Just saying nobody's put down anything concrete for me to evaluate.


Looking through my glasses I can see that they stop well within the range of my peripheral vision (even when looking straight ahead). So far as I'm concerned the augmented reality they present to me is just a little less blurriness and it really doesn't bother me where they stop doing that, but I imagine if my glasses stopped showing me colourful pixellated blocks around that same boundary then I might find that disconcerting. Especially after I gave my eyeballs a bit of a swivel.

However, my glasses are still way bigger than a big TV at a short distance.


I wonder... did Glass disappear because it didn't want to be compared with Hololens? That must surely be a very narrow FOV.

[pogo]

I can't dispute that a complaint is a complaint... but I do wonder how realistic people are being when they say "small".

Not saying they're wrong. Just saying nobody's put down anything concrete for me to evaluate.

The reason you can only read people’s impressions and estimates, nothing concrete, is because MS have not let anyone get anything concrete. Not only aren’t they letting the kits out of their sight for proper technical analysis. The people who’ve been given access haven’t even been allowed to take in cameras or similar. All they can do is go in, experience MS’s heavily staged demos, and write about them. And MS certainly haven’t released technical details themselves.

Here’s one more report, which is interesting for a couple of reasons. First it’s by Paul Thurrot, known for his enthusiasm for Microsoft products.
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/window ... t-hololens
But he also does a perhaps better job of illustrating the FOV problem with a picture, and with a poll of other testers:

In other words, if there were holograms in this “scene,” you can only see them if they’re visually within that rectangle in the middle. If they are outside that are, you cannot see them.

What this means is that you have to move your head around a lot. Holographic objects that were not dead center with the prototype in January were visible. But with the final hardware, you can’t see anything that is not right in the middle of your field of vision. It’s … constraining. It’s also disappointing, given how much better it was previously.

Since experiencing this, I polled everyone I could who had also used the HoloLens. Without any prodding towards a pre-defined answer, I tried to determine if my experience was common to theirs. And it was. 100 percent.

Again. Please don’t get me wrong. HoloLens was still incredibly impressive. Hologram image quality is amazing, and the display is rock-solid: If a hologram appears to be on a table, it stays in place as you move around in all directions. The edge-mapping stuff is a delight, like being in the Matrix. Really, really impressive.

They just need to fix that field of view issue.

[gumboot]

Yeah, when people choose to draw a rectangle inside a rectangle like that, I really don't know what they're trying to express. That if you're standing at 6' tall next to a 34" tall table -- about four feet away from its surface -- that hololens could barely cover a small coffee table book?

That really would put it on par with Glass, wouldn't it.

[Whiteball]

But the thing is for all it's supposed issues the experience is still compelling.

Look at everything that has been said about the Rift DK2 for example....

Smaller FOV than on my monitor - check
lower res than my monitor - check
screen door effect, but not on my monitor - check
etc etc

Yet, I can not play a game (and a great game Elite Dangerous is too) anymore as I no longer have a Rift. These things are not perfect and have lots of things we can all point fingers at and go 'nah, nah, nooo goood' but the fact is, once experienced it is really hard to go back even if the thing your going back to has a better spec 'on paper'.

Hololens is no different in these respects at all.

[fog]

Yeah, when people choose to draw a rectangle inside a rectangle like that, I really don't know what they're trying to express. That if you're standing at 6' tall next to a 34" tall table -- about four feet away from its surface -- that hololens could barely cover a small coffee table book?

That really would put it on par with Glass, wouldn't it.

Yes, from what I've read that is the case. When it was originally shown a couple of months ago one site likened it to viewing a 40" TV from about 10 feet away.

Therefore the recent Minecraft on the table demo would be viewable entirely as shown by the TV camera if you stood 8-10 feet away. Any closer and you see a fraction of the Minecraft world surrounded by empty table as shown in pogo's picture.

[Jamesac]

The difference between Rift and HoloLens is that Oculus worked from the perspective of what VR needed to be and spent years making the tech live up to the requirements. MS seems to have had a compelling idea but made the tech conform to a budget. Viewing the holo-whatsit in a window that small means the idea is a non-starter. It's a nice idea, sure, but they didn't go all-in in the way necessary to bring it to life.

[Darkflame]

Tech that conforms to a space more then a budget. The Hololens has to pack a lot more tech in then the Rift does, and the optical challenges of optically transparent AR are vastly harder then VR (which itself isnt exactly easy).
Microsoft is HUGELY beyond anyone else in this field. No one else has indoor tracking that works this good in a working piece of hardware. Not by a long shot. The nearest thing to Hololens at the moment is this;
https://www.getameta.com
Which itself is quite beyond other things in its field.

I also wouldn't even expect the Hololens to be very affordable. Its a full custom-spec Windows10 PC with a unique chip, and thats before you get to the tracking and HMD stuff.
--
Glass meanwhile was just a phone strapped to your head. Deliberately narrow FOV in the corner of your eye, but no tracking or gesture mapping at all. Not really comparable other then "its on your head".

And the reports were very different from what was shown at E3. In particular the version people were able to try had a very narrow field of view. So having Minecraft fill whole of a widescreen view? Not possible, at least not with the Hololens MS have let people try. Unless they’ve solved that problem in the few weeks since then what you see in the video above, captured by a large and complex camera rig, is very different from what the user sees through the head-mounted version. Smoke and mirrors.

http://recode.net/2015/06/15/the-risky- ... raft-game/

edit: I should add there’s a simple way to convince me I’m wrong – or to convince you that there’s still a lot of work to do. Release it. Make it available to developers/early adopters even in limited numbers. After all it’s one of the main platforms for Windows 10, alongside PCs, phones, tablets and the Xbox One, and Windows 10 comes out next month. It leaves a big hole in MS’s strategy not having it available in some form, especially as it’s the most radically different of the platforms so the one developers need the most time with to adapt their software for or to write new apps for.

But thats moving the goalposts.
The FOV has always been said to be small - right from the first demos back in Jan. That hasn't changed. If you said "the FOV isnt as good as what it seems in those videos" I would have agreed, or not said anything.

But "the FOV isn't that big" is far flung from what you said that seemed to imply it was all fake.

They bill it as a camera with a Hololens but a camera, even a HD camera, is only the size of a phone today. That’s a large computer with the camera and Hololens bolted on. At the same time the thing on his head looks like a final design, but they are probably years from having it working in such a small space.

Unless that is you think "having a larger computer" would allow them to have a bigger field of view, which is the only other way I can read that. Imho, the computer power is the least of microsofts problems when it comes to space.

[pogo]

But thats moving the goalposts.
The FOV has always been said to be small - right from the first demos back in Jan. That hasn't changed. If you said "the FOV isnt as good as what it seems in those videos" I would have agreed, or not said anything.

No, it did change from January, significantly by all reports. E.g.

Everything about the HoloLens experience is nailed. Except for one thing. The field of view was narrow. Very narrow. In both the horizontal and the vertical directions. You have this glorious 3D augmented reality experience... but only with your eyes looking straight ahead.

And it's not just me; I talked to other journalists who'd been at the January preview, and they had the same experience. The January prototypes didn't fill your entire field of view. The edges of the "screen" were visible. But they weren't this tight. I could look around a bit and still see the holograms. This time around, I couldn't.

Whatever the cause, it profoundly changed the experience. The unit I used improved every aspect of the HoloLens experience—the fit, the sound, the weight, the appearance—except for the part tying it all together. The holograms. They were simply too damn small.

Still very unscientific but that’s as MS have not allowed anyone to make measurements or released specs themselves.

[pogo]

The difference between Rift and HoloLens is that Oculus worked from the perspective of what VR needed to be and spent years making the tech live up to the requirements.

Hololens and Rift differ in two fundamental ways, both of which make the AR of Hololens more difficult. One is it’s AR; this means it is always going to be overlaid on the real world, and normally the real world is very wide, much wider than you want your ‘holograms’ to be. You could black out the real world beyond the AR window, but that would be disconcerting for most people, cutting off their peripheral vision. Maybe it will be an option but not the default.

The other problem is getting the ‘holograms’ into the eye. You can’t just put an LCD/OLED display there; not only would it obscure the reality beyond but the focus would be wrong, and you can’t use lenses as then the world will look distorted. Projecting onto e.g. a half-silvered mirror is hard as there’s nowhere to put the projector. MS have taken a third approach, projecting along the surface of the Hololens, hiding the projector and optics in the mounting above. But this seems to severely limit the size of it, in particular the height. I suspect they could make it wider but then it would have a very odd aspect ratio.

[pogo]

This is interesting: someone from MS on the FOV issue:

Microsoft: don’t expect HoloLens' field of view to get much better

"The hardware isn't final so none of the things are completely done," says Tsunoda, who works on HoloLens and brought Kinect to life at Microsoft. "I think you're never going to get to full peripheral field of view, but certainly the hardware we have the field of view isn't exactly final. But I wouldn't say it's going to be hugely noticeably different either."

edit: it’s from this video, at about 3:14 (that’s 3 hours, 14 minutes) in:

[zip accident]

I think this is relevant, did I post it before?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflector_sight