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I really think that in the future people will use something like holoportation[0] to work at home or remotely across the world. Because like you say sometimes it makes sense to be present with a person to accomplish a task. It is very hard if they are trying to describe something when it would only take half a moment to visually look yourself and understand the direction the person is coming from. Holoportation looks very neat I really hope I get to try it one day. [0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0

⬐ newqer

When I'm retiring, +/- 30 years from now, I'm going to put on my Virtual Reality glasses and never leave the house again.

⬐ runawaybottle

Don’t underestimate humanity’s ability to adapt to staring at screens as the norm (on a societal level).

what about something like this (holoportation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0

This is a pretty clever way to avoid the uncanny valley for VR videoconferencing. I assume we're a long way from photorealistic avatars based on the holoportation demo from MS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0

⬐ jameshart

The challenge VR videoconferencing faces is that by its nature, the people who are participating are wearing headsets that cover their faces. Even hololens headsets are going to get in the way of eye contact.

Avatars get around this by projecting a person who isn't wearing a headset.

⬐ jameslk

The Holoportation video feels a lot less cringe worthy and cheesy to me. At least there's a lot more body language that's being captured, which feels more natural. Their example of being able to record real life in 3D, play it back, and walk around in the experience also seems more innovative. But of course it's much further away from being ready to use unlike Spaces.

You might be interested in Microsoft's "holoportation".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0

Depends what you mean. 3D/360-degree? It's sort of doable using cameras and software to stitch and interpolate all the different angles but you're still viewing from a fixed perspective. That works in the current crop of VR headsets. Same with 3D/180-degree (or similar wide angle but not 360 3D stuff). I've watched several on my Rift dev unit.

Getting into "real" 3D, like being able to view from any angle is trickier but there are experimental and in-development methods of doing this. The easiest works for CG stuff (just look at your 3D content in your headset). The more realistic it gets, the closer to a "movie" in 3D. Combining video footage with CG environments is a nice little "cheat" that's already been played with as well.

But the real challenge and (as I see it) the ultimate goal in this space is being able to use something like multiple light field cameras or RGB+depth cameras (think Kinect) arrayed around a room or environment and capturing both live video and the 3-dimensional structure of the surroundings and any objects or people. The depth data from the various angles needs to be combined and "textured" with the video data in order to create something approaching a real 3D recording of something over time (so maybe they'll need to advertise as 4D movies).

Even cooler is when you can compress all of this data and stream it over networks to be decoded on the other end. The result will be like 3D telepresence where you're all but transported to another location.

Microsoft has been working along those lines and it makes sense since they have Kinect and Hololens. This is the sort of thing that will be the real "killer app" for VR/AR as far as I can guess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0

⬐ alasano

I was already blown by seeing the Oculus conference in California in my GearVR (Next VR app). This is the type of technology which makes me dream about how good retirement will be one day.

⬐ ryandamm

The challenge, as you said, is the data compression. Well, that and optics; it's hard to grab all the photons someone might see if they moved around....

⬐ None

None

This is probably also the first time they showed "Holoportation"[1][2] to the public.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d59O6cfaM0

[2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/holoportation/