Thoughts on Microsoft Holoportation

Microsoft is currently one of the forerunners in the field of mixed reality and augmented reality. With it’s development of holoportation, Microsoft is bringing social virtual interaction to our homes. Imagine the holoportation to be similar to a remote conference call where the remote user is virtually present in the physical space of the meeting. It allows users to hear, speak and interact with people in the same space although the user is actually not really in the same physical area.

The way the holoportation works is that there are 3D cameras which capture a users movements and interactions.With the help of these cameras, a temporal model is created. This model and movements are compressed and can be played anywhere in the world. This holoportation is possible because of state of the art 3D cameras developed by Microsoft Research. There are a series of cameras set up around a room. These cameras track and process objects within the room and create a 3D model of the same at real time. The required material is finally stitched together, compressed and transmitted to headsets like HoloLens.

The Holoportation can not only record and track objects, it can also record audio. In addition, an entire sequence can be recorded and replayed at a later stage. This can be extremely helpful in certain business cases. In order to get a review of a particular meeting, we can replay the entire holoportation recorded meeting.

Being a student who is studying 3000 miles away from home, devices like this can be extremely helpful when we feel homesick. It is a hassle to video call friends and family. With the help of holoportation, this entire experience can be made much more interactive and realistic. Another big development in Microsoft Holoportation is the use of holoportation in cars to present holographic images and videos within the confines of a car. One of the other interesting uses of this is to use it for Virtual Reality telepresence. Until now, for virtual reality, users were represented as cartoon images. This new product from Microsoft allows you create volumetric 3D projections which accurately represents the user.

While there are a lot of uses for the Microsoft Holoportation, it is not without it’s few drawbacks as well. One of the biggest drawbacks is that the user has to wear a Microsoft Hololens or another head mounted display. This is a big hassle for people as the head mounted display is heavy and cumbersome to wear. If a user wears it for a long period of time, he might be prone to neck pain. Another disadvantage of this is more on an ethical and emotional side. Old memories can be stored and replayed. While this may seem intuitive and exciting, it can have negative aspects based on the fact that some people won’t be ready to let go of some memories that were to be forgotten a long time ago. The simple ability to see and interact with people virtually could make some people just go into a virtual world and not be present and interact with physical objects.