From the vids I've seen, people that have tried both the initial and latest iteration agree that "something" is better with the dev release. Supposedly it is the same FOV, but something has changed to make the experience better. I expect that now that it is in the hands of devs, feedback to improve the experience will only get better.
Microsoft HoloLens [Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Holograms]
From the vids I've seen, people that have tried both the initial and latest iteration agree that "something" is better with the dev release. Supposedly it is the same FOV, but something has changed to make the experience better. I expect that now that it is in the hands of devs, feedback to improve the experience will only get better.
January 2016:
http://www.technobuffalo.com/2016/01/18/hololens-field-of-view/
"HoloLens field of view is like standing 2 feet away from a 15″ monitor" -- Microsoft
So does it have a wider FoV?
Can it subtract light?
These are very simple facts and not a matter of opinion. It's either true or false. You can't dismiss these technical arguments with "did you try it". How people feel have no value here.
In the promotional video I saw a person sitting at his desk designing a motorcycle which was taking up his whole desk.
A 24" monitor only takes up a small percentage of a desk. So sitting at your desk you would only see a 24inch window of the motorcycle, you would never see the whole thing unless you stand up and take one or two steps back.
In the other promotional video where they have a person in the room as a hololens hologram; you would only see a 24 inch windows of the person floating inside the room; only his/her head and maybe a little bit of the breast area, unless you look down.
To see the other person in full, would would need to stand a few meters back.
Am I understanding the capabilities of the hololens correctly?
If it can't subtract light using OLED, then a simple LCD black layer could perform a perfect per-pixel layer of light subtraction using the kind of B&W LCD technology that I had in my Casio digital watch in 1984.
It's more a matter of what's commercially required than of what's possible.
Can you focus on your watch at 1" from your face?
The LCD layer is a known method to add opacity in HMDs. It works per pixel only if it's somewhere around the focusing plane of the holographic grating, which is not possible here. The whole idea of using a waveguide is that it's an AR pass-though without optical-power.
Actually, I can. But that's because my eye's a shagged. But I don't see what bearing that has on Hololens!
You'd put an LCD blacking / blanking layer alongside the OLED layer so you could balance light emission with environmental light blocking. You wouldn't even need to have a huge degree of accuracy or responsiveness to get an overall gain from applying this in areas where it was needed. You could effectively combine sunglasses with a bright OLED overlay, and achieve fantastic results.
It would vastly increase the range of environmental conditions in which the glasses could operate.
Yeah, in it's simplest implementation that's pretty much it in a nutshell!
A more complex implementation might be to take a range of light beyond that which a human eye could tolerate, scale it down to a range which the eye can cope with, then enhance and overlay where required. Like a HDR camera with HUD attached to your face.
... for example.
The possibilities are remarkable, seeing this kind of technology as just a poor man's VR headset shows poverty of thinking.
This is a good visualization of the FOV:
The big problem with the FOV is that right now most of the big 'wins' for VR/AR seem to come from relatively close range interaction (say, 2-10ft). This is where you get to have direct interaction in arms' reach, lots of stereo depth, and ample screen real estate devoted to whatever virtual object you're looking at.
Yeah, at an inch or so from the eye that occluding LCD panel would be extremely out of focus. With Hololens you'd be focusing on objects 3-15ft away, and have a black fuzzy cloud stacked behind it, but your accommodation reflex might try to fight to bring it into focus. Sounds unusable for multiple reasons.
The big problem with the FOV is that right now most of the big 'wins' for VR/AR seem to come from relatively close range interaction (say, 2-10ft). This is where you get to have direct interaction in arms' reach, lots of stereo depth, and ample screen real estate devoted to whatever virtual object you're looking at.
Yeah, at an inch or so from the eye that occluding LCD panel would be extremely out of focus. With Hololens you'd be focusing on objects 3-15ft away, and have a black fuzzy cloud stacked behind it, but your accommodation reflex might try to fight to bring it into focus. Sounds unusable for multiple reasons.
Do you understand that your AR view is passing through, while the overlay goes through a lightguide?
We're talking about this product here called hololens. Not some imaginary completely different product.
A lens that can focus on an OLED + LCD stack, then a reverse lens to see through the outside world would be large and bulky, not a thin plate we see here. There are already many attempts at doing this, all bulky.
The problem is not easy to solve. Optical power need a focal length to work with. Focal Lengh needs distance. The rays need to bend based on a diffraction index, which is limited. Too much incidence and your light goes back in because it's beyond the TIR angle. Otherwise all DSLR lenses would be a thin plate.
I talked about this here...
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1895346/
EDIT: Ah... then I agree!
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Yeah, I kind of agree with that!
Incidentally, for my less fantastical and hyperbolic ideas that don't require everything passing through the same optics, I'm pretty sure that a black lcd blanking layer on Hololense or even just a photoreactive layer (as seen on light-reactive glasses since the 70s) could help to massively increase contrast and usability in the real world if it was deemed necessary. After all, your eyes don't focus on sunglasses when you wear them!
At the most basic level I can think of you'd use what we used to call "polaroid" or "reactalite" lenses here in the UK. Dumb layers that simply dim with brightness. Beyond that, a uniform LCD darkening / blanking layer would allow intelligent darkening of the lenses based on sensor readings.
Beyond that is where you get into potentially trickier ground, the idea I have is that you use a high resolution lcd "blind" and eye tracking (an inch away from a lense eye position would greatly impact on the needed darkening area to coincide with a projected image) to darken the area of the glasses which was appropriate.
I have no evidence to prove that this is currently acheiveable, other than my own experience of using partially shittied up glasses while Mountain Biking, back before I became a Jabba-Esque member of the PC gamer community. But I do believe that focusing *through* (rather than at) a selectively darkened lens is entirely possible without eye strain.
Anyway, that's my more realistic range of scenarios for improving Hololense, rather then just scoffing about the majesty and future potential of possible magic technologies (that I do indeed hope to see one day).
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Which is still far FAR larger than an ipad (9.7") held at arms (almost 3 feet) length. My monitor sits about 3.5-4 feet from me so it's relatively close to a 20-24" monitor for me.
Regards,
SB
Are you serious? You just stretched numbers to extremes trying to win an argument? You think most people have their eyes 4 feet from a 24 inches monitor, and that most people can actually hold a tablet 3 feet in front of their face?
http://lookafteryoureyes.org/eye-care/computers-and-other-screens/
"Most people find a distance of 50 to 65 centimetres (20 to 26 inches) comfortable."
Holding something in front of your eyes is the same distance as using the thumb rule for estimating sizes. Most people are around 20 inches.
This is literally called the rule of thumb, it's to multiply your IPD by 10.
At 20 inches the equivalent to hololens is between 11 and 12 inches tablet.
Whoops, only realised now that because of the projectors, light blocking is impossible.
Btw the hologram -'angle' is because the display is transparent. If they could the display would have been solid, as it's more in line with the simulated images in the marketing material.
Good luck watching a movie with dark scenes in an airplane during daytime unless MS supplies a Holobag: to put over your head 8- )
Edit:
Maybe a special black plastic movie mode peripheral will suffice?
Btw the hologram -'angle' is because the display is transparent. If they could the display would have been solid, as it's more in line with the simulated images in the marketing material.
Good luck watching a movie with dark scenes in an airplane during daytime unless MS supplies a Holobag: to put over your head 8- )
Edit:
Maybe a special black plastic movie mode peripheral will suffice?
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Great video - shame the game part isn't better done, it doesn't really explain as well as the other examples how limiting the FoV is but overall it's a great example...thanks for posting!
I used the iPad example as an easy way to visualise and test what you can expect, for clarity I meant the whole unit rather than just the screen.
This is my concern, @eastmen claimed it was better than a TV but I can't see how - bad blacks and transparency?
I'm confused. Hololens has a projection, not an OLED screen. The projection is onto a transparent visor that allows you to see the real world at the same time. This is intrinsically additive, and does not allow drawing of content darker than the real world in view. You'd need a way to draw black onto the visor at the same focal distance as the hologram. Occluding the visor by having it an LCD fails as others have pointed out.
So I literally have no idea what product you're describing!
If going that route, why not replace the transparent visor with cameras and composite video feed of the real world with the VR content?
Maybe he meant the broader sense; say you have a 80 inch pioneer OLED 8K HDR256 tv at 462HZ. This will probably be the best tv ever right?
Now imagine you are going on a plane. If you want to watch that TV during flight you would need to watch it in the cargo hold, it's highly unlikely that they would allow you to do that because of security reasons, and because they don't have power outlets there I think. Also there will be a lot of noise and it could be colder there.
Even if the Hololens only has a low contrast, transparent, 12 inch iPad at arms length image, it would still be better than the best Pioneer tv ever. Because even a small, bad tv, is better than no tv. Hence, hololens, even in the worst case scenario is
I was aggressively projecting my fantasies of being Geordi Laforge, regardless of the practicality or changes needed.
My next post attempted to give some more helpful suggestions that might work with the current design: photo reactive lenses; uniform LCD darkening; localised LCD darkening based on retina position.
I don't actually think LCD darkening on the visor would necessarily fail. I disagree with the notion that it needs to, even if it's not perfect. You wouldn't focus on it any more than you focus on glasses or sunglasses when you wear them. You see through them, while focusing beyond.
As an experiment, try taking some clear lenses and drawing a darkened area using a marker, somewhere close to the centre of the lense. Yeah, it's a little annoying and dark and blurry, but you can still focus beyond it and if it were adaptive and had a purpose such a creating an area where contrast for the overlay could be improved it would be a net win. Or just darken the whole thing, like sunglasses.
Localised dimming would serve a purpose, but it wouldn't solve the issue of drawing darker-than-ambient to the display.
Best example I can give that needs solving, is rendering virtual text over a real, blank piece of white paper.
Best example I can give that needs solving, is rendering virtual text over a real, blank piece of white paper.
