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Saturday, March 23, 2024

Strap on a HoloLens and Step Into the AR Conference Room

When Microsoft’s Alex Kipman logged on to our meeting last week, he showed up as a cartoon avatar standing somewhere between my cluttered desk and a kitchen filled with outdated appliances. This holographic version of Kipman somehow didn’t stun me—maybe I’ve had too many augmented reality demos at this point—but his appearance in my apartment, when he was physically in Redmond, Washington, is what Microsoft thinks the future of AR will be.

But first, I had to ask: Is Microsoft working on consumer-friendly AR glasses? Because the thing we were both wearing on our heads, HoloLens 2, well … it’s pretty extra. It is technically sophisticated, a full-fledged computer for the face, with 2K displays in each eye and built-in spatial audio and 6DoF positional tracking. But the headset is large, expensive, and brutally futuristic-looking. The first version of HoloLens was designed for developers, who were supposed to make compelling apps for it. The second version is sold to enterprise customers—entities ranging from Airbus to automakers to the US Army (which has been a source of some controversy).

If mixed-reality headsets are ever going to be used more widely, a couple of things are going to have to happen: They’ll need killer apps, and the hardware needs to be something that people will actually want to wear on their faces. Hence my question to Kipman, the man who invented HoloLens, about when these things would evolve beyond the enterprise niche.

Kipman didn’t really answer. He was more inclined to talk about Microsoft Mesh—the new mixed-reality platform Microsoft announced today during its annual Ignite conference, which is being held virtually. Mesh is powered by Azure, the company’s cloud computing service. The software will enable people in different physical locations to join each other in mixed reality to meet or to hang out. That’s the big news today, and Kipman wants to stay on topic.

“We’re not going to talk about hardware today, and there’s nothing to disclose,” Kipman replied. As he spoke, a mini holographic Alex Kipman was wedged upside down in a holographic convertible car, the result of us resizing and turning a series of virtual objects in this bizarre space. “But we are leading mixed reality today, and the objective is to continue leading it.”

“But it would be foolish, at this point, if you weren’t experimenting with AR glasses,” I counter.

“I think you would be correct,” he replied.

Later I would talk to John Hanke, the chief executive of Niantic, maker of the popular augmented reality game Pokemon Go, about the company’s new partnership with Microsoft and how it plans to use this new Mesh software.

“[HoloLens] is not a device that you’re going to wear on the streets. We’re using the HoloLens 2 as an experimental platform to start working with this stuff before future AR glasses that are consumer-friendly are ready,” Hanke said. Got it: AR glasses are the future. And this new mixed reality software from Microsoft is somehow going to get us there.

There may have been no better—or worse—case made for AR glasses than the experience I had trying to take meetings in large headsets in the days leading up to Microsoft Ignite. In order to give journalists (myself included) advance access to some of the features Microsoft planned to showcase Tuesday morning, Redmond shipped out a large, hard-shelled flight case filled with computer equipment. This included a HoloLens 2 ($3,500), which is “untethered” and doesn’t require a separate PC; an HP Reverb G2 VR headset ($600); and a 15-inch HP Omen laptop ($1,200 and up), which is what the Reverb headset plugs into. The gear overwhelmed my desk, and I had to move some into the kitchen.

Microsoft recommended that I spend an hour setting up the devices, ahead of a 15-minute run-through on Microsoft Teams with a public relations representative, ahead of an hour-long briefing—in HoloLens—with Kipman. To help steer the setup, Microsoft provided a QR code, which I scanned with my smartphone’s camera. This prompted a password-protected site, which led to a One Drive folder containing a PDF setup guide. “4 Steps,” the PDF read. There were 17 steps.

This was all so I could eventually watch an advance preview of the Microsoft Ignite keynote in VR; the HP Reverb G2 VR headset is powered by Microsoft’s mixed reality platform. But first, I had to take the hour-long meeting on HoloLens 2, in an app called Fenix. This part was easy, although “easy” is relative, as I have used HoloLens 2 before and am familiar with its user interface and some of the required hand gestures. I spent most of the meeting with Kipman pressing him on what was new about this Mesh software, and privately marveling at how wild it was to have a cartoon Kipman, his avatar’s hair coiffed in the same careful manner as real-life Alex, in my apartment.

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A couple of days later, a group of journalists were asked to meet in VR to get that early look at the Ignite keynote. The HP Reverb G2 VR has incredibly high-resolution eye pieces, making it one of the most immersive VR headsets on the market (i.e., it should not induce nausea). The casing feels cheap, though, and I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when HP decided that the charging port for the headset should go inside the eye frames, buried underneath the magnetic face cushion.

Before we met in VR, though, we all met on Microsoft Teams again, on our own, non-HP laptops, where a Microsoft public relations representative guided us through a necessary software update on our HP laptops. This involved going into Microsoft Outlook, downloading and extracting zip files, and installing the new bits. Finally we could all meet in VR, in an app called AltspaceVR, which Microsoft acquired in 2017.

Except, as with real-life meetings or those in 2D video apps, people meandered. We were now in the latter half of our hour-long VR meeting, and we had not yet seen the presentation. We floated around each other as cartoon avatars in the audience section of a virtual keynote stage. In real life, I leaned on my kitchen counter, so I wouldn’t stumble into anything and hurt myself. My headset volume was low; someone told me to press the Windows button on my hand controller to adjust the levels, but all that did was crash AltspaceVR—twice. I rejoined the group in the virtual world, and overheard someone say, “It’s so nice you can see the time of day in here,” referring to a tiny date and time display in the virtual world, which doesn’t seem very innovative if we’re being honest here.

Kipman still had not presented the director’s cut of Tuesday’s keynote by the time I left that meeting to log on to another. I had spent around four hours total either fiddling with headsets or taking meetings in them, and I still wasn’t 100 percent certain what I was supposed to be experiencing. Kipman had declared at one point that the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed, a quote most often attributed to science fiction writer William Gibson. In the context of mixed reality, this felt both like an overstatement and an understatement.

Early this morning, I tuned into Microsoft Ignite—this time on a regular laptop—to see what Microsoft had in store, and what Microsoft Mesh might look like. Kipman gave his virtual presentation wearing HoloLens, of course, but the environment around him had been transformed into an underwater scene, with 3D whale sharks floating by. John Hanke, the Niantic CEO, gave a demo of what Pokemon Go might look like in Microsoft Mesh, with the caveat that this is not yet something consumers can access. 

What I have gleaned from both Kipman and Hanke is this: Microsoft Mesh is a kind of framework for new level of “holoportation,” so that app makers can design experiences where people really are interacting with each other in virtual or semi-virtual worlds. But wait! you might say, if you’re someone who nerds out on AR/VR. Doesn’t Facebook already do this, with Oculus Spaces? Aren’t there other, lesser-known apps that allow this, like Arthur and Spatial?

Yes, but, those are in VR headsets, which means you’re totally immersed in that world. (Spatial also offers AR experiences.) And it seems like Microsoft Mesh in VR will be comparable to that. Mesh in augmented reality is perhaps more interesting. Even though Kipman’s avatar was an anime version of the real person when we chatted in HoloLens 2, it’s like there really was a hologram in my living room. All I had to do was ignore the fact that I had a 1.5-pound computer on my face.

Kipman said that the HoloLens team has been designing the next version of HoloLens, in HoloLens. To simplify this Inception-y revelation: Once in a while the HoloLens engineers put on their headsets and chat with each other as cartoons while they manipulate a virtual object that looks like the next HoloLens. Nevermind that they’re cartoons, Kipman said. The important part is that they’re collaborating.

For a company like Niantic, Microsoft Mesh could enable the next layer of social interactions through AR, Hanke said. Pokemon Go is an AR game, but it’s also a cultural phenomenon. It has encouraged millions of people to get outdoors, walk together, talk together. The way Niantic envisions Mesh is this: Two people are walking through Central Park playing Pokemon Go or Harry Potter, and then a friend in San Francisco remotely joins them via holoportation. “For me, this is mind-blowingly cool,” Hanke said. “I just love that idea that your friends from all over can join you not for a conference room session, but for a walk around the world.”

A walk around the world sounds great right about now. But to Hanke’s earlier point, no one wants to do this in a HoloLens 2. (Microsoft says demand for HoloLens 2 is four to five times the demand for the first version of the headset, and that 50 percent of the companies on the Fortune 500 list have purchased a HoloLens 2, but won’t share total user numbers.) The answer is supposed to be AR glasses—not the Google Glass kind, which projects a 2D image in front of one eye, but the “mind-blowingly cool,” immersive kind.

Everybody’s doing AR glasses. Facebook. Apple. Samsung. Qualcomm. Kipman insisted he’s thrilled by the competition. “I love it. I absolutely love it … Nothing says, ‘Yup, it’s real,’ more than seeing Samsung enter the space, or Apple enter the space.”

Hanke said he thinks it will still be a couple years before we see a consumer-friendly glasses experience. It will happen in fits and starts, and there will be some terrible hardware that ships in the meantime, he says. But the industry will cycle through that. The future will come. It’s right there, in the headset. Put on the headset. Just don’t forget to charge it first. And install the update. And turn up the volume. And enter the universe within the beta app. Can you hear me now?

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