NASA and Microsoft have teamed up to develop software called OnSight, a new technology that will enable scientists to work virtually on Mars using wearable technology called Microsoft HoloLens.
read the article ‘NASA, Microsoft Collaboration Will Allow Scientists to ‘Work on Mars’‘ Read More
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A lot of talk in the engineering fields about the promise of this new technology.
Be interesting to see if Autodesk will incorporate it’s functionality in their API for third party development.

Has anyone here used it while Beta testing Windows 2010?

Peak Warming Man said:

NASA and Microsoft have teamed up to develop software called OnSight, a new technology that will enable scientists to work virtually on Mars using wearable technology called Microsoft HoloLens.
read the article ‘NASA, Microsoft Collaboration Will Allow Scientists to ‘Work on Mars’‘ Read More
—————————————————————-

A lot of talk in the engineering fields about the promise of this new technology.
Be interesting to see if Autodesk will incorporate it’s functionality in their API for third party development.

Has anyone here used it while Beta testing Windows 2010?

Not sure the hardware is available yet

> … that will enable scientists to work virtually on Mars using …

It’d be interesting to see how people handle the time delay. For two way communication the time delay varies from about 6 minutes during closest approach and 42 minutes at greatest distance (or is that 8 to 48 minutes?). How would you cope with working in a virtual environment if there was a 42 minute delay between what you physically did and actually seeing it?

mollwollfumble said:

>How would you cope with working in a virtual environment if there was a 42 minute delay between what you physically did and actually seeing it?

I tend to think this time delay would negate all the useful aspects of using the device. There’s also the problem that the machines on Mars do not have camera’s set up to be useful for this type of application (AFAIK, I may be wrong). They need to have twin camera’s set up approximately as far apart as an average persons inter-pupillary distance to be able to render realistic 3D scenes.

Also, the Hololens is not a VR device; rather it is an Augmented Reality device designed to project 3D images on to the real world. The main difference between this and something like the Oculus Rift (which is a VR device) is the field of view. Hololens projects the equivalent of a computer monitor a few meters away from you within which all the computer stuff is animated. I believe the field of view is something like 40 degrees horizontal. The current iteration of the Rift has a FOV around 100 degrees. The difference might best be thought of as Hololens makes you feel like you are looking through a window in to a virtual world whereas the Rift makes you feel like you are in a virtual world.

Hololens isn’t available for anyone to review outside of any tech demo’s Microsoft give. The recent presentation with a woman on stage wearing the Hololens glasses and using them to do work in real time was apparently staged. Journalists who got to try out the device afterwards wore a huge, clunky Frankenstien monster rather than the neat glasses, the image of which Microsoft are using to market this product. It’s likely that any consumer release of the Hololens is years away.