Gadgetory

yeah so this might look weird but what we're doing right now is getting a demo of hololens and a new way of making video with hololens let me back up a little bit Microsoft's mixed reality headset hololens first started shipping last spring now unlike virtual reality headsets which put you in a completely virtual environment hololens layers digital elements over the real world around you but unless you're the person who's actually wearing the headset it's hard to describe what it is you're seeing in front of you until now Microsoft has just put out a kind of toolkit that makes it easier to share your hololens video the set up still has a lot of requirements but it's at least one way to make a hololens app visible to people who don't have headsets with hololens you can run Windows 10 apps you can browse the web you can play games just to name a few one of the demos that Microsoft has shown consistently is how you can use Skype to give someone a tutorial on home improvement projects or just chat with your coworkers but let's say you're like most people and you don't have this headset this is where spectator view comes in spectator view is the name for the rig that Microsoft has come up with what you're supposed to do is use this mount to attach the hololens on top of the DSLR you're only doing this for positioning data though you don't actually want to cover the camera with the hololens that positioning data is sent over Wi-Fi to a PC that's running unity software then you output video from the DSLR to the PC using an HDMI cable once all that video capture and positioning data is in unity you can create a composite of all the data which makes your hololens video file for you I mean theoretically you can also do this with something like a GoPro it doesn't have to be a DSLR for the sake of this video we're kind of simplifying it I mean in reality you still need a lot of equipment but seeing it in person was pretty interesting in a meta kind of way the hololens has always had a built-in mechanism for capturing video which Microsoft calls mixed reality capture but it would only show you the first-person point of view also it came out as slightly lower quality video there's also another way Microsoft has been capturing hololens video and it requires using a multi-thousand dollar read drag camera with a hololens attached so it's not exactly accessible so to be clear this is a cool hack or workaround but there aren't a ton of hololens users out there something in the thousands as far as we know and also most of the people that are using hololens right now are developers or commercial clients not consumers in fact a lot of the apps we saw here on Microsoft's campus or apps for commercial clients but if Microsoft or any other headset maker is ever going to be able to take these things from niche to mainstream people are going to have to get a sense of what their actual value could be which is hard to do when the overwhelming majority of the population has never tried this type of computing device before the hope here is that video sharing can help with this so is it a small step in the relatively small world of hololens yes but it's a step in the right direction welcome to the hologram universe mm-hmm welcome to my holographic world